


A Terminal Case of Having a Heart

by CherryFlight



Series: Oddworld: Brothers of Disparate Queens [1]
Category: Oddworld
Genre: Amputation, Characters with too much empathy in a world that hates it, Gen, I mean Abe is present by mention, I'll add their tags in later, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, canon characters will show up towards the end probably, fire-forged friendship, internalized ableism, more tags to come as needed/requested, since plans may change, spirit visions gone wrong, unintentional suicide bombing, well not their original intention anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24486493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryFlight/pseuds/CherryFlight
Summary: Dee is an uncommon Slig who has managed to survive by finding an uncommon niche for himself, and being smart enough to pretend at the rest.  At a party his boss throws to celebrate salvaging his restaurant chain as a business, he meets Ben, a Mudokon who, as far as Mudokon slaves go, has led a sheltered life.Things are about to go horribly wrong for them both.
Series: Oddworld: Brothers of Disparate Queens [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768843
Comments: 22
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

Dee’s mechanical legs added an ominous buzzing undercurrent to the lively chatter of the fleech fry in his boss Aydik’s home. He passed under colorful LED signs reading “A CHUMP NO MORE: HAPPY 1000’TH” or “PAPA AYDIK’S BAR AND GRILL: WE ARE SURVIVORS!” He wove between groups of animated Glukkons accompanied by fellow Slig bodyguards or Mudokon attendants. They raised perfectly battered fried fleeches - battered with the good stuff, not the clumpy, over-greased crap from the restaurant blend - to their mouths when asked, or poured new glasses of wine or SoulStorm Brew – the most unlikely main attraction he’d ever seen. Somehow, it was made more appealing by the sight of it splashing into a glass first. Dee swallowed a mouthful of saliva, watching the swirl of pale green liquid as a Slig poured the last of a bottle for an indulgently grinning Glukkon in a red pinstripe suit.

Once, it had been just another product to sell to the masses, or this version had been. Dee had idly thought of trying it; he’d thought it wasn’t going anywhere, would always be close at hand. Hell, Aydik had even bought a trial case of the stuff, to see if there was any appeal paired with his food. To simply say there _was_ appeal, apparently, was an understatement, because Aydik had fallen in love with the idea. He’d ordered posters, commercials, sandwich board signs for soon-to-be-sunburned Mudokons to wear on street corners. He spent himself well out of his Wannabe status in anticipation of its returns.

The problem was, Papa Aydik’s didn’t have a hunting department before all this. Aydik had cut a deal with RuptureFarms, got the meat that wasn’t leaving fast enough. It worked out wonderfully - until a sudden worker revolt of massive scale took out its main plant. Within a month, SoulStorm Brewery was completely destroyed by primary boiler sabotage, at the hands of the very Mudokon who had led the RuptureFarms revolt. Dee – and everyone on staff at Aydik’s corporate office, except Aydik himself – thought that was it for them. What remained of RuptureFarms had cut them loose and the drink they’d sunk the most advertising cost into was gone, too. Rather than assume he needed to pursue another avenue of income, Aydik had locked away his trial case of SoulStorm. It was now a finite – and therefore preciously lucrative – commodity, and would make a safety net. He’d told Dee that much, before dragging him along as his personal bodyguard to lay the groundwork for his continued business. Even as he fell down the Glukkons’ wealth-based status ladder he’d pulled some kind of strings inside the Magog Cartel – hell if Dee knew what, he and the other parties’ bodyguards had been posted outside the majority of those rooms – and found a way to reestablish himself as an independent company.

Honestly, thinking back on it, it _was_ kind of impressive. He’d like to celebrate, too. He was part of it, sort of. But he had to patrol, making sure the Mudokons behaved themselves – recent events had taught everyone a lesson on the dangers of complacency – and ensuring drunk Glukkons didn’t get too rowdy (what could he do if they _did_ , though?). He _might_ get leftover fleeches. There would always be more of those - precisely why Aydik put them on the menu. He might get some of the less popular wines, too, even if it wouldn’t be as nice as that sweet sparkling stuff that actually went well with the food. But SoulStorm? Not a chance. The market iteration was rare and exclusive now, and that meant being able to say you had some was a potential status symbol.

“Hey, you hungry?” asked Slick, one of the few Sligs familiar to Dee as their patrols crossed paths in the back of the room. They were near the kitchen here, and the smell of frying fleeches wafted out, making Dee’s stomach rumble. A cook yelped at an errant oil splatter. Nobody close enough to hear it paid it any mind, and those Mudokons that _did_ glance that way quickly returned to whatever they were doing, seeing a pair of Sligs by the door. _Running to help each other is dangerous now,_ Dee thought.

“You think?” he answered. “We’ve been patrolling a freaking _feast_ all night.”

“Hah! Well, guess who’s drunk himself dumb enough to share? Mr. Dun- uhh, _Drunce_ just gave his Mudokon a fleech! Gave me one, too, when I got close enough. And a swig of brew! You should take advantage of it before someone tells him to stop.”

“You kidding? He even gave you SoulStorm?” Dee turned his head towards the Glukkon in the wine-purple suit who had so generously supplied the party’s alcohol. He was rambling on about something to his patiently-smiling Mudokon attendant. (Strange, to see a sober Mudokon smile. Laughing gas didn’t produce something that looked quite like that – he wondered now if those carefully-staged photo sets actually convinced anyone like Aydik thought they would.) “Man- I mean, I’ve _seen_ him drunk, I was with him and the boss at their meeting, but…brew, too?” He remembered that meeting – just the two of them and some of Drunce’s wine, some talk about buying his product as an ingredient in a sauce. Aydik had used his nature against him, and he came out of it none the wiser. It had been incredibly difficult not to make knowing eye contact with Drunce’s own bodyguard, and he'd seen the other Slig hiding rude gestures at their boss behind his back, trying desperately out of sheer boredom to get him to laugh while his boss utterly outmaneuvered theirs.

“Oh, right,” said Slick. “Sometimes, when I think you’ve got it all, I remember _I_ don’t get to be trapped in a room listening to two of these guys yammer on.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Dee. “This place has free grub, at least. Thanks for the tip!’

“Anytime, bro. Enjoy!” Slick gave him a thumbs-up as he headed towards the lonely pair. Dee wondered what kind of favor Slick was trying to curry with Aydik through him _this_ time. Whatever it was, it was probably harmless enough to make this now-rare chance well worth it.

Drunce was visibly unsteady on his feet, wobbly on a Glukkon’s top-heavy center of gravity, bound up in their suits and shoes as they were. A bottle of wine sat mostly empty on the nearby table, a clear culprit for his current state. His attendant precariously balanced a tray overflowing with fleeches on one hand – a bottle of SoulStorm rocking dangerously on its edge – and kept Drunce upright with the other, making worried noises as he tried to keep both Glukkon and food from falling over. With Drunce’s absolute inability to stay still, he had his work cut out for him, but he was doing a commendable job of it. At least, until the noisy approach of a Slig made Drunce twist suddenly to see and the Mudokon lurched to try to keep him in reach.

The bottle of SoulStorm Brew – one of so very few left in the whole world – tipped off the tray. Time seemed to slow as Dee watched what might be his only chance to try the stuff begin its fatal descent to the hard faux-marble floor.

“Oh no!” the Mudokon gasped, raising a hand to his mouth.

“Wha- my brew!” cried Drunce in dismay, wobbling and falling over onto a couch without his attendant supporting him. The lanky being’s quiet “oops,” was the last coherent word Dee made out for the next few seconds.

“I got it, I got it, I got it!” Dee found himself repeating in a desperate mantra, a prayer to _make_ him catch it as he hit the emergency eject on his pants and was spring-launched into empty air. He barely heard the clatter of metal behind him, focused entirely on his prize. 

“I got it…” The rounded green bottle tumbled end-over-end, glinting in the light like a jewel. 

“ _Got it!”_ Dee hit its smooth surface, warm from recent touch, and latched onto it with hands, tentacles, and even his tail as if his life depended on it. He tucked into a roll, and the impact sent him and the bottle spinning.

For a heart-stopping moment, he wondered if his life might _actually_ depend on it. What if the bottle hit the floor first? Dee thought it would break under him. An image of himself impaled by a shard of glass flashed through his mind. What a stupid way to die _that_ would be.

His back hit cold floor. The sharp sting of cut skin didn’t come. Some part of him waited still for the realization that he was dying anyway, even as he thought _I’m alive_.

He refocused on his surroundings to see Drunce’s attendant lean over him, his wide-eyed green face disconcertingly high above him.

“Nice catch!” said Drunce, out of view.

“You okay?” asked the Mudokon, and Dee realized he was still clutching the brew tightly against his body, tail curled around it, as if it was his to keep. No – it never had been. He was still at the mercy of that drunkard’s whims on that one. Not to mention, he certainly wouldn’t be able to move while holding it.

“Yeah, I’m good. So’s the brew,” he said. He uncurled and lifted the bottle up for the Mudokon to take. “Here, take it.”

“Okay. Thanks for saving it!” The Mudokon took the bottle and stepped back to give Dee room to flip himself over, arms shaking from residual thrill as he lifted himself up.

“Nice one!” called an unfamiliar Glukkon as he crawled back towards his abandoned pants. He heard him turn back to his conversation with a quieter, “Undignified as all hell, but whoever trained _those_ reflexes needs a whole lotta raises.” Dee fought the urge to audibly curse at the bulk of the credit being shoved onto someone else, worst of all the trainers at SligCo. He’d thought that _was_ a particularly nice catch. He could have died if he’d landed the wrong way up, after all. Shouldn’t he have _some_ credit?

His potential death only mattered to him, though, didn’t it?

He’d always known, in some way, but having the explicit thought felt…strange. Like something swallowed the wrong way, that felt like it got stuck on its way down. He tried to ignore it as he crawled his way across the floor. His expendability had always been a fact of life, and maybe he was just being overdramatic at himself. He probably wasn’t even really in danger of death – could that bottle have broken into any shards long or sharp enough? 

Probably not, but downplaying it didn’t make the uneasy feeling go away.

“Ben, give that Slig a hand,” said Drunce.

“Okay, sir,” said the Mudokon – Ben, he supposed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw him begin to move closer.

“Nonono, put the brew down somewhere first.”

“Oh, whoops. Sorry, sir.” Ben retreated back out of his peripheral vision.

“All right, _now_ go give the Slig a hand.”

His legs longer than Dee’s arms, Ben outpaced him handily, reaching his pants first. Of course, he had no idea how to reset the release mechanism and prime it for use again. Most Slig pants didn’t have features like that and for those few that _did_ , Mudokons had no need to learn such things – in fact, it could be potentially dangerous, given the times. “Uhh…here ya go?” he said, pushing the pants towards him as Dee crawled up. He gave him a bewildered shrug as he propped himself up on them with a hand.

Dee shrugged back with the arm that wasn’t holding him up. “Thanks, I guess?” He wasn’t sure what Drunce had meant for Ben to do, either, but the thought that someone wanted to help him right now, even if they didn’t know how… And Ben had been so eager to obey the order to _help_ that he’d forgotten to put the brew down first. Had that ever happened before? He couldn’t remember ever feeling this sort of lightness in his chest. It chased down the lump in his throat, as he reset his pants and eased his tail into the control frame. 

He would like to feel this way more often, he thought.


	2. Chapter 2

Ben stayed close by as Dee got himself locked in and upright. He took his mechanical legs through a series of test movements – left and right, forward and back. Once slow to test range, once fast to test speed, and a little hop, for shock handling and weight. 

Any Slig knew what he was doing, but Ben had clearly never seen it before, and he giggled in that doofy way Mudokons sometimes did. “It looks like a little dance.”

“It’s a test,” Dee said, scooping up his rifle when he was satisfied with his pants’ performance. Most Mudokons would flinch here (especially after speaking to a Slig unprompted and _especially_ after laughing at one, even if he clearly hadn’t meant to be mocking), but Ben had clearly lived a sheltered life, or was very confident of his safety, because he didn’t shy away from the gun. Maybe if it had been pointed anywhere near him… but that didn’t need to be tested. Slick would give him an earful about not ‘showing that Mudokon his proper place’ later, but that was Slick. All impulse and no thought, that one. Dee would just remind him he’d have screwed himself out of that swig of brew he was so proud of if _he’d_ been in this situation instead.

Besides, he got the feeling, somehow, that Ben’s desire to help him had been genuine, and not merely following orders or avoiding punishment. Something in the way he’d asked if he was okay. Something in the way he’d stuck around to make sure he got on his feet and they could carry him. He could have gone right back to his boss to help him stand. And that still felt really, unexpectedly, _nice_. 

“All right, Slig’s on his feet.” Drunce had managed to squirm into a sitting position on his own in the meantime, but otherwise seemed stuck. “C’mere, Ben, help me up, would you?”

“Okay, sir.” Ben padded over to help the still-wobbling Drunce to his feet, and Dee followed to watch and assist. Clearly, though, Ben had practice in this department – he had his boss upright before Dee could even offer his help.

Actually, how weird was it that he’d learned Ben’s name the way he had? How many Glukkons addressed their workers by name outside of publicity things, or singling out specific Mudokons for punishment? Drunce wasn’t a _generous_ drunk so much as he was a _sensitive_ one, and he filed that away to tell Aydik later. There were plenty of manipulations to be made here, he was sure, and his boss would be grateful.

“There we go,” said Drunce, swaying so heavily that Ben struggled to support him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit down, sir?” Ben asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Drunce. “Don’t want to look like I can’t handle a little drinking!”

“You were drinking a lot _before_ coming to this party, sir …”

“And would you want to buy wine from a vintner who doesn’t enjoy his own product? Pour me some brew, Ben. That’ll help my focus.”

“I guess not, sir – I mean, the wine part, not the brew part. Right away.”

Drunce chuckled fondly as Ben stepped away. He swayed again, and Dee reached out to grab the front of his suit. The fabric stretched, but – thankfully – held. “Thanks, Slig. Hey, you got a name?”

“Not one usually worth mentioning, Mr. Drunce. I’m Dee to the others, though.” Dee wondered where this had come from. Even when Aydik had him _very_ drunk at their meeting, he’d never shown this sort of vulnerability, hadn’t spoken familiarly to his own bodyguard or asked about Dee. Now that he thought of that meeting, was the Mudokon that served their wine Ben? He’d worn a knee-length white skirt like Ben wore. All of Drunce’s Mudokons wore something like it. It matched Drunce’s favored aesthetic without making them out to be more than servants. Ben’s had a second layer, but Dee hadn’t really paid attention then – Mudokons tended to just be _there_. Did it matter? Why did he feel like it mattered? This wasn’t important.

Was it? 

“Here you go, sir,” Ben said, cutting into Dee’s reverie with a glass of SoulStorm offered at Drunce’s lips. Dee stepped back to give them some space as Drunce drained the glass and licked his lips with a pleased grumble. Being different, being rare, that was important. It was why the market version of SoulStorm was a luxury now. And that was the answer to his question. This was _different_ , and that made it important, worth paying attention to, whatever that eventually meant. He hadn’t survived for so long by dismissing these unusual details.

“Not bad,” said Drunce. “We’re gonna run out of it – or never have it as good again. Glad I got a taste. Might’ve had one taste less without you, Dee.” He grinned wide, displaying teeth bearing faint pinkish stains from his excessive habit. “Know what? You can have the rest!”

“Uh…what?”

“The rest of the bottle, sir?” Ben asked.

“Yeah! He saved it, after all! Give it to him.”

“Uh…okay?” Ben glanced awkwardly between the two of them before holding the tray out to Dee, a corner of his mouth quirked upward in baffled uncertainty.

_Score!_ Dee thought, once the bewilderment cleared. He snatched the bottle with an excited, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Drunce!” and tipped it back to his mouth, tentacles splaying over his hand. Slick would be so incredibly jealous – he got a good half a bottle instead of just a mouthful! He caught a glimpse between bottle and tentacles of Ben and Drunce grinning at his enthusiasm, and a cynical part of him that had decided to shut up for too long thought _Wait, this might be a trick_ , just as the stuff hit his tongue. Remembering he’d seen Drunce himself _just_ drinking from this bottle, he shoved the confusion over their smiles aside and chugged the whole thing, in equal parts greed and attempt to ignore his anxiety. His stomach gurgled as it finally got something to work on – he really should have asked if he could have a fleech – but he didn’t care. He’d deal with that later. He memorized everything he could about the taste to tell the others, matching descriptions he’d read or heard to his experience, and finding something he hadn’t expected – a tangy, sour note that wasn’t particularly _good_ , but didn’t break the deal for him. It wasn’t mind-blowing, but after hyping himself up for it, he really should have expected the reality to fall short. Not that he would say that. That would just be rude.

“Man, that _is_ pretty tasty! You know, I was worried I’d never get to try this.”

“You deserve it,” said Drunce. “Hey, why don’t you stick around a while? I don’t see anyone feeding you guys.”

Sensitive drunk, indeed. Dee counted himself lucky to have fallen into his best of good graces and – with a glance around to make sure he wasn’t needed anywhere – stepped into the little circle the seating marked out around the table to join Ben in listening to Drunce ramble on about anything, brightened by the thrill of SoulStorm, crispy fried fleeches, and tasty sweet wine.

Over time the SoulStorm and wine worked his mind into an unusual state, highly alert but somehow detached like he’d vibrated out of his own skull, and Drunce’s rambling bled into an unfollowable mess. Dee lost track of where other Sligs were and what other Glukkons were doing, like this little section of the room was a bubble. It was kind of nice, actually - no obligations, no pressure. Which meant, inevitably, it would burst. A trio of Glukkons led by the one in the red pinstripe suit he’d seen earlier waddled up from behind Drunce, grinning and cackling at a joke between themselves Dee hadn’t heard.

“Hey guys, you guys, watch. Watch this,” said Pinstripe. “Hey, Drunce!”

“Yeah, what?” Drunce said, turning to see them and nearly falling over, just as he had when Dee himself had approached him from behind. Ben displayed practiced reflexes and stepped in before Dee could even make himself move, steadying Drunce with both paws until he found enough equilibrium to stand with less assistance.

“Don’t’cha think all this is kind of, you know, weird? You had a pet fleech as a kid, right? We all did.”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well here we are eating fleeches. They could’ve been our pets’ kids, yeah?”

“I dunno. I mean… Molluck wanted to chop these guys up for food, too.” He tipped his head in Ben’s direction. “And some other guys even agreed with his plan! Isn’t that kinda the same?”

The trio of Glukkons burst out laughing, one of them snorting and devolving into a coughing fit. “’The same’, he says!” Pinstripe crowed over his coughing friend. “The same! Is that it, is that why this wimp has more meat on its bones, it’s your _pet_? See, I told you two, he’s so stupid! Wastes his money on feeding his workers – I mean his _pets_. I’ll bet you give them midday breaks, too.”

“Hey, I’m not _that_ dumb!” Drunce protested, his voice rising suddenly and sharply enough to prompt a hiccup. “They get breaks when they can’t work and that’s it!”

“And what is ‘can’t work’? They’re your _pets_ , Drunce, your spoiled _pets_. You can’t even do that right! Hey, you – shiny-pants Slig!”

“Uh, yeah?” Dee asked, shifting uncertainly as he became aware of a gnawing discomfort in his gut, both churning physical and the deep pit of intuition warning him of trouble.

“What happens if you never hit your Slog?”

“Uh, I was never given one, sir. But I heard they don’t do their jobs right. Go up to intruders lookin’ for treats ‘n’ attention instead of attacking.”

“That’s right! See, this Slig’s done his homework. Never had a Slog but knows what doing it wrong means!”

“Um… I’m not-” Whatever example they were trying to use him to make was bad news, he knew. If he’d been sober, he might have kept his mouth shut instead of voicing that, found some Glukkon-friendly way of getting his point across. Instead, _that_ came out of his mouth, and it took a sharp look from Pinstripe to earn him that realization.

“You’re not _what_ , Slig?”

“N-never mind, sir.” Dee flinched and stepped back.

“That’s what I thought! Now, why don’t we show Drunce’s _pet Mudokon_ some discipline, yeah? He obviously can’t do it himself – just _look_ at it.”

“Sir…?” This wasn’t good. Neither Drunce nor Pinstripe were his boss, but either one of them could tell Aydik anything. Drunce was likelier to be honest, probably, but the idea of going against his generosity grated just now, in the false clarity of his caffeinated inebriation.

“Come on, Slig! Give it a solid smack. Do it!”

The imperative command sent a jolt of panic through him, fear of disobedience. Ben ducked behind Drunce, dawning terror in his huge eyes, as Dee slowly turned his rifle over in clumsy, shaking hands, gripping it by the barrel so its solid stock would make an effective bludgeon. He didn’t even beat employees at headquarters if he could help it. Injured workers were less efficient, it wasn’t worth taking out one’s frustrations on them.

Or so he told Aydik, who encouraged it in the others. _Maximized profits mean maximized paychecks._ In reality, whenever he had to in order to keep up appearances, the sounds of an object striking flesh and cries of pain echoed his most horrid memories of youth. Of screams and wailing silenced suddenly and forever. Of encouraging shouts as fights broke out. Of blood and breaking bone and unending pressure and pain. 

Where his brothers learned it was normal, that inflicting pain was how one established their superiority, something in him stubbornly continued to call to mind his own fear and hurt instead. Cafeteria chatter was rife with gruesome stories of how Sligs like him would be killed when discovered. He’d even seen it happen during training, to a guard who gave one of the surviving targets an encouraging pat on the shoulder after a competition. He’d been dragged off, screaming for help that they had all been trained to never give. His kind wasn’t unheard of, but they were so rarely seen or heard. He’d been smart enough to learn how to pretend, to hide instead of bend. 

Something in his grip or hesitation betrayed him today, though, and they burst out laughing again.

“I don’t believe it, are you _all_ soft? Is that what Aydik’s doing, now, too? Come on! Do it already! You gotta learn how!”

The threat of smearing Aydik’s name at his own party was another push. Dee forced himself to raise his rifle above his head, pants whirring as he adjusted his balance. His stomach gurgled dangerously.

“Hey, hey,” said Drunce. “You don’t gotta listen to these guys, you don’t answer to any of them, do ya? Give it a rest, you three.”

“Are you trying to protect your pet? Aww, isn’t that cute?” Pinstripe drawled in mock sweetness. He returned to a domineering bark with another command: “Come on, Slig! _Now_!”

Dee tried to summon the will to do it, unable to reconcile the snapped command with the look of pleading concern on Drunce and Ben’s faces, of being the one to crack the latter’s refreshing earnest innocence. His mind swirled rapidly between the consequences he had to choose from and proved unable to put them in any order.

“Pathetic. What would your momma say if she could see this?”

_“What would your momma say?” Crunch of bone and sudden silence and a hot rain of blood._ Fear leaped from brain to heart to arms like cold lightning, veins of ice paralyzing the back of his throat and threatening the same for his lungs. 

He stepped forward to swing. Ben pushed Drunce aside to land on the couch again with a confused, “Hey?” 

Guilt stabbed through the numbing cold fear in his heart as he watched Ben throw his arms up to protect himself, but he couldn’t make himself stop.

The rest of his body had other ideas. His stomach seized in a sharp ache, and he dropped his rifle to clutch it with both arms, groaning as he doubled over. 

Distantly, he recognized it as an out, reaching for the words through fuzzy drunken fear and pain. “Ugh…that brew really packs a punch…”

Pinstripe gaped a moment as comprehension dawned. “Are you _kidding_ right now?” He burst into derisive laughter and his friends followed. “Drunce, you fed a _Slig_ SoulStorm? You’re not gonna be able to get more, dumbass!”

“I don’t believe this!” said one of his friends. “There are _puds_ smarter than you, Drunce.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet even that Lulu guy is-”

“ _Hey!_ ” Aydik’s voice cut in above the bullies’ laughter, and everyone present jumped slightly – Ben vaulted over the table - at the sight of the fuming Glukkon in a suit made to look like a stained apron. All of it was fake, of course, and anyone who thought about Glukkon anatomy for five seconds could see the obvious sanitary issues if it wasn’t (not that bits of Mudokon hair, blood, or meat didn’t make their way into dishes where they didn’t belong all the time…)

“Hi, boss,” said Dee, wincing through the pain in his gut. Aydik glared at him wordlessly, and his stomach sank into his tail. Here he was mingling with guests instead of patrolling. The favor that had protected him for most of his career – his life - might be gone for good, all because he’d wanted to try a drink. Because he’d wanted food out of turn. Because he’d been lured in by friendliness.

But Aydik’s ire wasn’t directed at him right now. His burning eyes bored into the Glukkons present. “Which one of you good-for-nothings took an extra bottle of SoulStorm? I told you all I would be _counting_!”

“Wasn’t me, Mr. Aydik!” protested Pinstripe, suddenly much meeker. Aydik could call for security and the Sligs willing to listen to him would vastly outnumber those loyal to Pinstripe. Their pay for today came from him, after all.

“Me neither,” said the other two in near-unison, verbally stumbling over each other to be heard.

“There’s- there’s only one bottle here, sir, see?” said Ben, gesturing to the empty bottle on the table.

“Someone in this room is _lying_ to me. And when I find out who…” He looked up to the ceiling. “Hey, Watcher! _Watcher_!”

A Slig face peered over the edge of a hanging sign. “Uh, yeah, boss?” He sounded groggy. Sleeping on the job _again_. Dee thought sometimes he should submit himself for flight training, since they couldn’t seem to keep a flying Slig worth a damn. His one slip here couldn’t compare to Watcher’s laziness. But he was proud of all the upgrades he’d bought for his pants, with their articulated feet and backup electric battery. Besides, training a Slig to use a new set of tools was worth time and Moolah, and he had to prove himself worth both all over again, or save up both for himself. And that was _before_ the reality of going back to the hell that was training.

“Did you see who took an extra bottle of SoulStorm?”

“Uhhh…”

“ _Did you_?”

“No sir, I’m sorry, boss.”

“Stupid, slurg-brained…go check the security video!”

“On it, boss!” 

Watcher’s rotors sputtered to life, and immediately died. Of course he couldn’t be bothered with maintenance.

“ _Go, you worthless idiot!”_ Aydik roared, and as if his rage had an effect on the machine, the whirring motors started again, and Watcher flew over the guests’ heads - taller Glukkons had to duck out of his terrified, erratic flight path – and out of the room at the opposite end from the kitchen.

Still glowering at them all when he returned his eyes to the group, he said, “The next plate of fleeches hasn’t come out of the kitchen, either. _You_ ,” he leaned in closer to Dee, who couldn’t help but flinch away as his shadow fell over him. “I _might_ forgive you if you go figure out what’s going on. Take that Mudokon too, they might be up to something – they’ll think twice about trying anything funny if you’ve got one of their own with you.”

“He’s _mine_ ,” Drunce slurred in protest.

“Yeah? I don’t care. That Slig’s mine and you borrowed _him_. Fair’s fair. Now both of you, get to work!”

Dee glanced over at Ben, who looked lost and scared, clearly torn between leaving his boss and obeying this new, scary Glukkon. “C’mon-” he stopped himself short of calling Ben by name, worried now of what Aydik might think. He’d already directly compared him to a slave. “Follow me. Let’s do what the boss says.”

With a worried glance back at Drunce on the couch, Ben padded after Dee in a nervous shuffle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Pinstripe" and his awful pronoun usage: I recently replayed some of Exoddus and noticed some of the info signs referring to Mudokons as "it/its", and decided I had to have one Gluk or another use it. (Those were tutorial signs, of course, but it seemed even weirder to me the _developers_ would do so, so I thought that'd be a Glukkon thing since they were using their tech to tell us how to play the game.)


	3. Chapter 3

The chatter had turned sour as they made their way across the floor, Aydik’s anger and the dwindling food topics of disturbed discussion, with groups drawing in towards the center to share amongst themselves. Ben seemed skittish after his scare, but stuck close by him rather than drawing away as he thought he would have. 

Slick, having seen him get more brew than he had, but also fall out of the boss’s favor, gave him a rude low vocalization and obscene gesture as they passed, no longer interested in being friendly. Dee returned the low screech and waved his hand dismissively, as if to say _same to you, now shut up._ Slick cackled behind them.

“You’re all really mean to each other,” said Ben. Dee glanced his way, but said nothing. _They all want us to be. Mother, trainer, boss…_ He’d managed to display a different kind of worth, but it had always hung by a fragile thread. One that, given Slick’s shift in behavior, had a very poor chance of holding.

Near the kitchen threshold, Ben tried again. “You don’t wanna be. You didn’t actually want to hurt me. I could tell.”

“Cut that out. I’m on thin ice as it is. Don’t need anyone hearing you saying that, gettin’ the wrong idea.”

“Or the right one,” Ben said, just loud enough for him to hear. Dee gave a couple of higher sounds that, depending on who they were for, could mean displeasure or acknowledgment.

Ben seemed to pick up on the ambiguity and smiled, about to say something else. But as he pushed open the kitchen door, his smile fell away, and he went stock-still. 

The missing round of fleeches sat piled high on their tray, fresh from the slow softening soak and waiting for the fryer. Around them, blood smeared the table where injured Mudokons had tried to stay upright. Their bodies still lay at the table’s feet. Blood streaked the floor, leading in trails to other corpses, some who had moved further away from the door, several having tried to crawl towards it for help.

“What in the world…?” Ben cautiously knelt by one who had made it closer to the party than the rest, and shook his shoulder gently. He felt for a pulse at his throat and breath at his lips. He looked up at Dee and shook his head, horror haunting his expression.

“Hey!” Dee called. “Anyone alive back here?” 

No response but the sounds of the fryers passively bubbling and the faint hum of the chant suppressor just above them in the corner. Dee wondered what stories its camera would have to tell. It seemed that was the only way to get answers.

“You’re not in trouble,” Ben added, and Dee swiveled his head sharply to try to cut him off. He couldn’t guarantee anyone’s safety, and if one Mudokon had gone and murdered the others, he most certainly _would_ be in trouble.

Someone whimpered before he could say anything. Ben made for the sound immediately, and Dee took a step after him, but his stomach cramped again, halting him mid-stride as he clutched himself in pain. Was this a normal effect of SoulStorm on Sligs? Or had he just had too much to eat and drink on an empty stomach? He remembered reports of SoulStorm’s volatile reactions with Mudokon intestinal gas. He hoped that didn’t happen to Sligs, too. Fearing two incredibly stupid ways to die in one day was too much.

When the pain faded and he straightened up, he saw Ben helping a pallid grayish Mudokon out from under a prep table. The poor thing looked about with wide, frightened eyes, streaked with blood that trickled from wounds in his arms and chest. He clutched a knife in his trembling, bloodied paw, and only handed it over to Ben when he saw Dee, as if he hadn’t heard him before.

“It wasn’t me,” he said, “it wasn’t me, honest.”

“What happened here?” Dee asked him, breaking the relative silence of their background by approaching the two. Ben put the knife on the table with the fleech tray and reached for a towel.

“Here,” Ben said, “lemme clean you up. I’m Ben, and the Slig is Dee. What’s your name?”

“G-Gary, my name is Gary.” The Mudokon continued to whimper, flinching as Ben dabbed at his wounds. “It wasn’t me, guys, it wasn’t! It was Cai,” he said, “he’s gone out of his mind!”

“Hold the towel over that big cut here,” Ben told him. “Did he pull that knife on you, Gary?”

Gary nodded, sniffling back tears and wincing as he did as he was told. “He wandered off, said he had to take a leak. He took a while…we were all too busy to notice he was still gone - until he showed up with a bottle of brew in his hand, ranting about having ‘done it’. Didn’t know what, just knew he had the brew. Ricky told him ‘hey, that stuff’s dangerous’.”

“The missing bottle of brew,” said Dee. “Aydik’s real angry about that.”

“He came back here,” said Gary. “Before Cai came back. Might’ve been looking for it, but he didn’t talk to us or anything. None of us, we never worked for brew, you know. We all know it’s a bad idea. When Cai started drinking the stuff, Ricky tried to get the bottle away from him. That was when he grabbed this knife! And-and then…” He dissolved into frightened sobbing.

“Slow down, you’re out of danger now,” Ben said patiently, as Dee turned the new information over sluggishly. None of them had been incentivized by SoulStorm Brew, and he knew that was true. Aydik had specified as much – didn’t want an addict slave stealing his stuff. But Cai was desperate enough for the stuff to attack the others. Clearly, someone lied and brought a worker in withdrawal to the party. Maybe Pinstripe. That guy was a jerk. Would be the best outcome, he’d get some comeuppance then.

“I managed to get it away from him but- I- I didn’t mean to!” Gary let out another sob. “He just kinda fell on the knife and- I didn’t wanna kill anyone!”

“Whoa, what?” Dee said, broken from his thoughts.

“He- he crawled off, but he was bleeding so bad.” He pointed at the door leading into the hallway. Sure enough, there was a trail of blood that vanished into the maroon carpet there. “I don’t think he could’ve made it. I’m sorry, I’m real sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“You were defending yourself,” said Ben, “of course you didn’t mean it.”

“What am I gonna do?” he wailed. “I can’t tell anyone, they’ll think I was the one who did it all!”

“Sit down and wait for us, okay?” Dee said. He turned to Ben. “Let’s go check it out, see if this Cai guy’s still alive. If we learn as much as we can, and try to explain together, the boss _probably_ won’t jump to stupid conclusions. Probably.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Ben said quietly, with an uncertain glance at the survivor.

Dee gave the wretched, shivering thing a dubious glance of his own, the facts so far finally filtering through the fog of wine to remind him that he’d been found surrounded by dead Mudokons with a bloody knife, even if he’d been injured too. The thought of this unassuming Mudokon sneaking up on them to stab them in the back unsettled him too much to ignore. He reached for the knife on the table. “Let’s take the knife with us.”

“In case Cai can fight back? You have a gun.”

“Then _you_ take it,” he said, shoving it at him.

“If you say so,” said Ben, with a shrug. He accepted the knife, though. “He’s wounded. You can protect me just fine. I think you worry too much.”

“Tell me something I _don’t_ know. Just move.” Dee gestured with his head, a light flick of his tentacles, as he walked past Ben into the hallway. Ben directed another shrug at Gary before padding along beside him. 

Dee wasn’t sure what to make of the way it made him feel, what Ben had said. What Mudokon assumes a Slig is going to protect him? But it felt good enough that he didn’t want to reveal his real motive for taking the knife.

The blood trail was difficult to pick out in the carpet. Dee lifted his head to survey the corridor. At one end, a Glukkon voice lock sat dark and dormant, Aydik’s bedroom door wide open. He’d probably come back here to relieve himself, instead of looking for the missing brew. It might have even been when Cai managed to steal it. There was nobody in view from the hallway, but closer hiding places were the worker restrooms in front of them, or the equipment room at the other end of the hall – less a room and more a closet to hide the big, ugly gas tank that powered the kitchen equipment.

“Why do his carpets have to be red, too?” Ben said, kneeling down for a closer look. He picked at the carpet with his fingertips.

“It looks fancy,” said Dee. “Sure is inconvenient right now, huh? Maybe I should’ve sprung for a blacklight filter for my mask, or somethin’ like that.”

“Your job usually deal with murders? You’re not psychic,” said Ben. He stood up and pointed towards the door labeled EQUIPMENT. “I think the trail leads that way.”

As they neared the door, Dee heard faint, manic giggling coming from the other side. A Mudokon voice called out in thready sing-song, “I hear ya comin’, Sliggy! You’re too laa-ate!”

“Cai?” Ben said, reaching for the door handle.

Cai giggled weakly in response as Ben pushed the door open. He lay curled with his back to the gas tank, twitching fingers rattling the empty bottle of SoulStorm he held against the floor with an unnervingly even _clink-clink-clink_. His blood was a bright stain on the dingy gray concrete, and he grinned at them madly from its center, the light from the hallway reflecting off his eyes.

“And a Mud, too. Look at you. Placid little meep at your herder’s side. An ingrate, like the rest of those chumps. We were destined for _more_. I saw it, I saw it all. They took it all away from us! Lifetimes an’ lifetimes an’ we didn’t know better!”

“What do you mean, you ‘saw it all’?” Ben said, at the same time Dee asked, “What do you mean, we’re too late?”

Cai cackled at the overlapped questions. “Doesn’t matter anymore. They’ll get theirs. You all will. You’ll all…you’ll get yours…”

His eyes went glassy, and his body went limp with a final, rattling breath.

The handful of heartbeats in the new silence seemed to last forever. 

“What now?” Ben asked.

“We got a confession,” said Dee.

“No we don’t,” Ben pointed out. “All he said was he saw something and we’re too late.”

“Well, we got a _scene_ , anyway. Empty brew bottle, too. Someone’s in trouble for bringing an addict along. We can go, and get the boss to come back here, and- ugh, phew.” Dee turned his head away from the foul smell that had begun to fill the room, tentacles curling under his mouth as if they could keep the stench away. “Hey, Ben? Warn a guy, would ya?”

“That wasn’t me, Dee.” Ben smiled awkwardly, as if apologizing for having to stifle a giggle at the site of such a grisly scene. “Your bum’s all muscle, too. If you’re dead, you can’t exactly hold in-…” He trailed off in a horrified gape, his eyes swiveling down. “… _Oh._ ”

Dee followed his line of sight to the empty bottle of SoulStorm Brew in Cai’s hand. 

"...Oh. Oh, shit."

He hadn’t crawled here at random. He might not have even been addicted at all.

“The others!” Ben turned to run. Dee saw the window through Aydik’s open door as he turned, and reflex and instinct overtook his dread.

“No time!” he said, giving Ben a shove forward. “The window! Run for it!”

Ben still tried to veer off into the kitchen, but Dee caught his arm, pulling him away and pushing him forward again. “No, you’ll die too! Go!”

“What?” Gary whimpered from inside as they passed. There was no time to explain. 

“Just _run_!” Dee called back. His stomach gurgled again at the strain as he pushed himself to run harder, the motors in his pants whirring. Hollow-boned Ben shot ahead of him, pained determination on his face as he passed him by.

Dee realized as they drew closer he could not see the reflection of light in the window –their exit was only barred by the insect screen! He came to a brief stop, pivoting for momentum, and hurled his rifle at the window. Ben yelped in surprise and pulled up short as it sailed past him and hit the screen, knocking it loose. The sensors that would send a jolt through any Mudokon that hit it beeped in protest at the lost contact.

“ _Go!”_ Dee yelled, and Ben leapt into the screen, knocking it down and rolling into freedom. Dee resumed his mad dash after him, leaning into his run as he barreled forward.

A wet _pop_ sounded behind him. Dee didn’t want to look back.

“Dee!” Ben called.

_“Run!”_ Dee leapt into the open window just as a deafening _boom_ rumbled through his chest.

Everything went to chaos at once.

His peripheral vision lit up in a hellish glow. A force like a great hand smacking him aside threw him forward. Something hit his head, and his vision went fuzzy. Pain burst through him as his head was struck again on hitting the ground, washing over his mind and leaving darkness behind.

At least Ben had turned to keep running when he’d said.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Act bridges are hard. I apologize for the delay!

She loomed, a monstrous silhouette in the fiery wreckage of the estate, wreathed in smoke like a demon. He felt her anger as if it were heating the fire, and he curled up into a tight ball, cowering with his arms over his head. Dee was helpless before the wrath of his feared queen, no pants to flee with, no gun to defend himself with, and no courage to use them if he’d had them in the first place. 

Skillya spoke, her voice reverberating with a deep, warped echo. “Consumed in avarice, competing with your brothers. You put up the appearance of any Slig, and yet…and _yet_.”

The strange formality didn’t register, only the threat in her tone. “No, Ma, no, _please_ ,” Dee cried in desperation. His stomach turned as a pair of massive hands gripped him by the arms and lifted him up, helpless as he kicked his tail to try to get away.

“Dee, you’re alive, oh thank goodness, you’re breathing…” Ben’s voice sounded like it was far away, filtered through water or cloth. His awareness drifted into something more solid. His left side burned with pain, especially his arm, which felt horridly wrenched, an extension of agony from his elbow down. His stomach churned, but his body didn’t grant him the relief of vomiting up whatever bothered it. His body was too heavy to move, his eyelids too heavy to open. He felt hands take hold of him and tug, and he yelped as fresh, sharp pain shot up his forearm.

“Oh, that’s bad, that’s bad. Hang on, Dee, I gotta…I’m sorry, I’m sorry, don’t die on me!”

_Run away, Ben_ , he thought but couldn’t say as the hands – Mudokon paws - left him, and he sank back into the hell that was being trapped with his mother, still helpless in her grasp.

_“You gave your precious seconds to a Mudokon!”_

“No, Ma, no, _nononono_ -” Dee broke off in a scream as Skillya _pulled_ , pain burning in his arms and stomach as he felt himself split in half. His world again descended into pain, Ben’s distant voice repeating in wracking sobs, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh _Odd_ , Dee, I’m so sorry” as nothingness once more followed on its heels.

He didn’t know how long he drifted in that darkness. Skillya’s looming figure haunted him from a distance at its depths, in fleeting glimpses of dream states or half-consciousness, like she was stalking him through the void. He sometimes came near enough to awareness to feel his arm still wrenched awfully, his left fist closed painfully tight, and he couldn’t move his fingers to alleviate it. 

Sometimes, he could feel wet grass under him, bending under movement. 

Sometimes, he was aware of slight elevation, metal at his mouth and a slow trickle of water, or a piece of meat that vaguely reminded him of Scrab ribs. All he could remember from these moments was how much effort it took to simply eat or drink.

The pain in his stomach came and went, but his arm was either completely numb or burningly painful. “My arm,” he’d sometimes be able to say in a weak groan. 

Ben’s only response was “I’m so sorry, Dee…”

Other times, he’d drift into awareness, feeling cool air or rain, and hear Ben begging him to survive, _please_ survive.

And then, finally, he was able to keep his eyes open. Firelight cast a faint orange glow on rock walls, with no features Dee recognized.

He wiggled his tail to prompt himself to stand, and felt it slap against hard rock, bare. Something wound tight against his upper arm and his forearm still hurt like someone had tried to make a corkscrew of it. A small fire flickered to his right, but before he could look, something scraped against the rock and Ben loomed over him. As he knelt down, he saw he was splattered with dried blood that plastered his now-unbound feathers to his neck and shoulders. His eyes were hollower and wearier, as if he hadn’t slept in days. As Dee maintained eye contact, they lightened in relief with a smile.

“Are you back with me for real, Dee?”

Dee groaned, trying to lift his arm and finding himself still impossibly heavy. “Where are we? My arm hurts like hell…”

The smile slipped away, and Ben bit his lower lip in a whimper. “Dee, don’t be mad. Please, you were pinned and I couldn’t leave you.”

Dee shifted himself to try to look at his arm, finally forced his shoulder to lift enough to bring his arm into view of his left eye. “What did you do to my-…”

He stared through the empty space that burned with pain, at the bloody cloth tied tight and further bound with an elastic band that capped his arm off at the elbow.

The nightmare of Skillya pulling him apart flashed through his mind.

Dee screamed, and could not stop. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the bloody remains of his arm, or his mind from the terror of his head and eyes and memory all unable to agree.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ben repeated, over and over again, grasping the sides of his head in both paws as he doubled over, sitting heavily beside him. “We were the only ones and I couldn’t leave you, you wanted to be nice to me, _you didn’t have to save me and I had to save you and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_!” He broke off into incoherent tears as Dee’s panic continued to fuel itself, screams chasing screams chasing screams. The more logic he found, the worse it was.

He was ruined, absolutely ruined. No pants, one arm, worthless. As good as dead.

His screaming ran itself down into ragged gasps, air scraping raw in his throat. He curled up on himself, around the remains of his left arm, shivering so hard he could almost convince himself he was cold. Ben continued to weep and apologize beside him, sounding as if he hadn’t noticed he’d gone quiet. 

Eventually, their pained breathing by the crackling fire became their new silence, disturbed on occasion by a stifled sob.

It took what felt like a long time to work up the will to move. 

Dee reached out and prodded at Ben’s ankle, exhaustion slowing him. Ben sniffled, then shifted to his knees. “Dee-…”

“Don’t- Just don’t say you’re sorry again. Sick of hearing it.”

Ben gave another grating sniffle and tried a tired, forced smile. “I would’ve brought you back for help, but I was afraid they’d-…well, what do you think they’d think of a single Mud still on his feet, after everything that blue guy’s done?”

“Probably nothing great,” Dee admitted. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“Some searchers, some reporters.” Ben crossed his arms tightly, as if hugging himself. “I thought at first, when I hid, I should’ve approached them, to see if they’d take you for treatment. But then I thought, you were gonna get caught in the explosion, and you were telling me to run. If I sacrificed myself for you, well…it’d all be for nothing, wouldn’t it?”

“You didn’t have to go back anyway, for food?”

“Found an old RuptureFarms trap, some poor Scrab wandered into it. The kill switch still worked.” He lifted up a bloodstained cloth sack that had once been someone’s suit. “It’s not gonna last us much longer, though. I gave most of it to you, knew you’d need the strength…”

He hadn’t remembered eating quite so much, but a glance at his mutilated arm reminded him he couldn’t trust his own perception so strictly. Even now, his mind was trying to tell him it felt the weight of the full limb. Ben averted his eyes in clear shame.

“I didn’t want to…you were gonna die if I left you there, from breathing the smoke. Some debris had pinned you clear through to the ground, everything on top of it was too heavy...”

“I’m gonna die anyway.” He wanted to snap that more forcefully, more bitterly, but it just came out abjectly miserable. Seeing the pain in Ben’s eyes was like a kick in the gut, and it snuffed out any fire before it could even begin. “How am I supposed to move, Ben?”

Ben’s mouth quirked into a sad ghost of a smile. “Come on, Dee, I wouldn’t do that to you. I brought your pants, too. Had to get you out of them after a bit, but I kept making the extra trips to take them too.”

The Mudokon stood with a pained grunt, and Dee noticed the ragged hem of his skirt – it had been torn off up to the middle of his thigh – a bit more like standard Mudokon loincloths now - and the entire top layer was gone, too. Some of it had been tied into a sash that held the knife he’d taken from the kitchens at his waist, but the rest…maybe that was part of his dressing now. His hair tie certainly was.

As Ben stepped around him, Dee poked gingerly at the area above the stump where his elbow had been. He winced as his fingers left burning sensations where he touched, but feeling pain in something that he could _actually touch_ was an improvement, as far as he was concerned.

Ben returned at his tail with the sound of metal on rock, and Dee curled to see him lay his pants down. “Here, I’ll help you,” he said, kneeling to help him fit his tail inside. In his exhaustion, he found himself grateful for it, his own movements slow and clumsy.

Secured into the control frame, Dee flipped his tail to roll the joints and right himself. His lingering panic eased as he took a few steps to prove to himself he could move under his own power. But when he ran himself through the test motions, his missing limb altered them; the balance was different, the pants’ automatic adjustment kicking in in different ways or at different times. It was all _off,_ and it made him want to vomit. It brought a weary heaviness that weighed him down from head to tail, that made him want to slip back out onto the ground and sleep forever. 

He pitched forward after the test hop, but he wasn’t strong enough to overcome the stabilizers; his pants wouldn’t let him collapse. He drooped where he stood, hoping at the back of his mind that this was another nightmare.

Ben seemed to read his body language and tentatively reached out to pat his back. It was somehow both skin-crawlingly awful and a blessed comfort for being so present and real. It wasn’t a nightmare; he wouldn’t wake up from this. But there was someone who wanted to help, and this was equally real. Someone who cared about whether he lived or died, someone who considered what he might want, or tried to. “It’ll be- it _has_ to be okay, someday. It can’t feel awful forever.”

Dee let out a shuddering sigh. “I guess.”

When he looked back at Ben, he saw he was holding his gun. He laughed bitterly. “Dunno what I can do with that. It’s not one of those one-handed models.”

“I thought maybe…I mean, Sligs like their guns, right? I thought it’d comfort you.”

“Maybe,” Dee said, reaching out to take it. He rested its tip on his shoulder. “Doesn’t look right to see _you_ holding it, that’s for sure.” He inclined his head in approval as that got Ben to smile a bit more. “So, uh…you had a plan for when I woke up, or were you just winging it this whole time?”

“Honestly, my plan was just ‘keep both of us alive’. We’re all that’s left. I looked really hard in the wreckage that wasn’t on fire and… listened for screams in the wreckage that _was_ , but everyone else…our bosses, the others,” his voice broke, “they’re _gone_.”

They were both in a rough place, Dee realized. He had a new, awful disadvantage on top of his existing one. And Ben had not been _at all_ prepared for a typical Mudokon’s life. Drunce had seemed more considerate of his workers than any Glukkon he could think of, even allowing Ben to hide behind him as a Slig was ordered to beat him. (He doubted he needed Ben pushing him aside, though. They’d never know for sure, now.)

Nothing but hardship or death awaited them back in civilization. Still, what choice did they have? Die out here of starvation or exposure?

“Aydik set up his home close to RuptureFarms. The train tracks that went to it are probably still around. We follow those, we hit civilization. I can vouch for you, get you back into the workforce.”

Ben smiled with a birdlike cant of his head. “You’re really generous with your voice, Dee.”

“Huh?”

“You did that with Gary, too. Offer to lend your voice to help him avoid suspicion.”

“It just makes sense. One of you guys might not get taken seriously, but one of you _and_ a Slig? When it matters, why wouldn’t I?”

“You’re a good person.”

“I mean-…” he set his gun down, scratched at his neck, “your definition of it, yeah. Doesn’t make a whole lotta difference. Makes things worse, actually. Anyway, enough about my moral failings-…”

“I’d call them successes,” Ben cut in.

“You don’t gotta live as a Slig.” Absently, he reached over to rub his arm and flinched when his hand closed around empty air. His stomach lurched and cramped. He shoved his uneasy thoughts away, into an available task. Getting Ben to safety was better to focus on. “ _Anyway_ , what do you think? Drunce really _did_ spoil you, so it won’t be easy. Whoever you wind up working for probably won’t treat you so great. But you’ll have a roof over your head, and enough food to survive. Better than dying out here.”

Ben was silent a moment, eyes down at his feet. “What about you? Any chance they’d see to your arm?”

The throbbing ache in his stomach and phantom arm had spread to his head now. A lean and a flip of his tail directed his pants to sit. It was tempting to just lay down and go back to sleep, in spite of the pain.

“Dee?”

“Just tired. Hurting.”

“Oh, I’m-…”

“If you’re about to apologize again…”

“Oh. Yeah, I was. Sorry.” 

Dee looked up at him in the following awkward beat of silence and snickered. 

“Dangit,” Ben muttered, a grin poking through his self-blame at the slip.

Dee studied his truncated arm as he considered an answer to his question, worrying at the elastic tie holding the dressing in place with the tip of a tentacle. The blood didn’t look fresh. He wondered how often Ben had changed it, how often he _could_ have changed it. How long it had been.

“Do…do you think you have a place to go to?” Ben prompted.

Dee sighed and lowered his remnant arm again. “I don’t think so. I mean, yeah, _some_ Sligs who survive losing parts still manage to find jobs. They were already trained in something they could still use, or they land in entertainment. Maybe their boss likes them, or maybe they survived in an impressive way.”

Ben smiled encouragingly, but it didn’t reassure him. “I think you could entertain. Wasn’t _Magog on the March_ still looking for segment hosts?”

Dee snorted. “Yeah, sure. Have me read off all sorts of stories without betraying myself. They’d shoot one take and know they’d have _another_ Slig who’d bail out on camera. They’d put me in one of those fixed chairs and toss my pants. Besides, that assumes they’d want to wait for me to heal.”

“I think you assume the worst too much.”

“I think _you_ hope for the best too much.”

Ben stuck his tongue out, Dee made a couple light clicks, and they both couldn’t help but giggle at the ridiculousness of it all.

“You’re like one of those naïve baby brother types on TV,” said Dee. “Who’d have thought they were real?”

“I’m probably older than you,” said Ben, putting on the fakest of straight faces.

“That’s ‘cause you guys live twice as long. How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“That’s seven in Slig years, and I’m eight – so I’m older. Technically.” Ben burst into a fresh bout of giggles at that, and Dee followed, the laughter easing his mind and his pain. “Hey, you know what it’s called when you get the giggles on a TV or movie set? Corpsing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, since playing a corpse is the worst time to laugh.”

Ben snorted through another giggle. “I can see that, yeah.”

“It’s why if the character’s _really_ dead, they just use a real one if they can. Thought that seemed appropriate.”

Ben’s laughter faded into a warm smile. “You’re not gonna die, Dee.”

At this attempt to bolster his spirits, Dee’s cheer sapped away. Ben was too optimistic. He didn’t know how to make him understand he really didn’t have a chance. “I probably will. If I was more of a badass, I could get my way into something. But they’ll see what they named me and know I’m _not_.”

Ben blinked in confusion. “Huh?”

“Did you think Dee was my full name?”

“Well, yeah, sure? It’s a name.”

“Is it? Never thought of it as one. It’s short for-…” Dee sighed, reluctant to say it. Though it was censored in all publicly available paperwork, its vulgarity was the least of his worries. It was as if the real thing held some kind of power over him, as if mentioning it would somehow ruin everything. “…well, let’s just say it’s ‘Drone Sucker’. That’s close enough. Went by DS for a while, _that_ got shortened to just Dee.”

Ben stared at him, a thousand questions in his eyes and gaping mouth that he somehow managed to sort of distill to three. “What- how… _why?_ ”

“’Cause I got by on _pretending_ to be mean, and that meant a lotta latching on to bigger, meaner Sligs and making a flunky of myself. Was the only way to keep myself from losing it. More brown-nosing than action can float you by on a technicality, but you can bet your ass it won’t go unnoticed. Why do you think I never had a Slog? Was barred from raising them in my lease terms. ‘Possibility of improper temperament’, or something.” He made air quotes with his right fingers and gave a dismissive scoff that bled into a low noise of disgust, half at himself for instinctively raising his left arm too.

Ben sat in front of him in a crouch, leaning forward. “So…they couldn’t _prove_ you’re so kind-hearted.”

“Exactly. But they couldn’t prove I was violent enough, either, just that I did everything I possibly could to please someone who _was_.”

“So they named you… _that_. That’s terrible.”

“That’s life, Ben. They’ll look at my injuries, look at the name SligCo wrote on my lease back when, and then I’ll be someone’s lunch.”

“So, we can’t go back.”

“Huh?” Dee lifted his head, then gasped as the cramping in his stomach started up again with a vengeance. He cringed, wrapping his remaining arm over it, hand grasping again at pain on his other side that wasn’t. “No, we gotta- _damn it_ , if my ghost arm and stomach can stop having a race to hurt the most for just _ten minutes_ …”

Ben made a worried noise and scooted forward, extending a paw with his knuckles towards him. “Where do you check a Slig for fever?”

“Hell if I know,” Dee muttered. “In case you haven’t figured it out, they don’t exactly care about our health, mostly.” While Ben tried testing the side of his neck and the top of his head, he continued, shifting his head around to accommodate Ben’s testing paw, “Anyway, we _have_ to go back. I’m gonna die either way. You don’t have to, if I can vouch for you before they chop me up.”

“No way,” said Ben, pulling his paw back. “There’s gotta be something else. Let’s give it another day or two to think it over, get ourselves used to…everything. Take this more slowly. I don’t want you to die for me.”

Dee let out a long-suffering sigh. Ben was just going to keep repeating that, wasn’t he? And, honestly, he was finding it very hard to argue against someone not wanting him to die.

Odd, but he was so tired, and he hurt so much.

“ _Fine_. Okay. Okay, we’ll do it your way. We’ll rest today and figure out what to do tomorrow.”

“Rest is good!” Ben said hopefully. “I mean, I hope, now that you can wake up and stay that way.”

“Quit worrying. It’s gonna make me worry more.”

“Sorry. Oh, uh- I mean-…” He trailed off into a little scoff of laughter. “Never mind.”

Dee eased himself to the ground, his pants’ leg propping itself up as he went flat. His exhaustion pushed him to near-numbness, and still sleep did not come. Through the night, his consciousness was a patchwork of painful wakefulness, horrid nightmares, and things in between that he could not discern.


	5. Chapter 5

It was well into the morning, light streaming into the mouth of the cave, when he woke to the smell of Ben heating the last of their lucky Scrab find. Even if they’d tried portioning it for one more day, Dee could tell from the moment he bit into it that it would have been a risk. This was the kind of meat Aydik set up close to RuptureFarms to buy at markdown for. 

Ben finished eating first, scarfing it down quickly. And then, he seemed to withdraw, sitting with crossed legs, paws resting on a foot, rocking slightly now and then with his eyes far away. It was uncanny, and disturbing in a way Dee couldn’t name.

“Hey, where are we?” Dee asked. He had to say _something_. 

Ben blinked, snapping back to the present. “Um, something used to live here. Fleeches, maybe? I saw some shed skins – tried to burn some for the fire, they don’t burn that well. But if there were any left, we would’ve been eaten by now, I think.”

“Probably cleared out by Aydik’s wrangling teams. Might’ve been the first test batch, actually. You couldn’t have carried me that far. So, we’re, uh…” He stopped, swallowed his current mouthful, and thought about it. “Might be faster to cut through RuptureFarms, if we’re heading for the tracks.”

“ _If_ we’re heading for the tracks,” Ben said. “I still don’t want you to die for me.”

“Either way, we should pay it a visit. My pants’ fuel tank will last me about…what, three days on the move? Might not be able to find more on the way. Could be some left from whatever’s left of the guard stations, if any survived the fire.”

“You don’t think they’ve been cleaned out by now if they did?”

“The ones that were left standing and obvious, sure. But you got any idea how much fuel that place kept on hand? Molluck practically set up in the middle of nowhere!”

Ben broke into a grin suddenly, understanding. “Which means getting out here was a pain, too!”

“Exactly, and then its major connections got shut down or screwed over, too. Nobody wants to comb through the collapsed stuff now. Waste of time and manpower. That means _we_ can do it.”

Ben climbed to his feet and stretched, rolling his neck and shoulders. The distant look in his eyes was less so, now. He seemed brighter and more alive, and that made Dee feel better about this already.

A feeling in his stomach like he’d swallowed a rock set in as he realized any other employer would allow – even _encourage_ \- his security to beat all that brightness right back out of him.

But was it any fairer to make him starve out here in the wild? Would they be able to feed themselves without lucky breaks like that Scrab trap? He couldn’t fire his gun with one hand. And once his pants died for good, he’d be entirely reliant on Ben.

“Something wrong, Dee?” Ben asked. “Are you still in pain?”

Dee’s head snapped up to look at him, fast enough to make the ends of his tentacles sway after. “Uh…” He looked down at the cooked meat still in his hand. “No- I mean, yeah. But that’s not what I- …I’m just thinking. Trying to figure all this out, you know?”

“I know,” said Ben, quiet and gentle. He didn’t offer any more words, and took a seat beside him. When he rested a paw on his back as he ate, Dee found himself leaning into it, the comfort like balm for his burns.

And when he was finished eating, he finally stepped outside, Ben leading the way with one piece of a pile of salvaged cloth from the wreck of Aydik’s home tied into a currently-empty bindle on a fallen tree branch.

The fleech hollow was a tiny cave set into a rocky hillside ringed with trees. Fallen seed pods crunched under Dee’s feet while ahead of him Ben made his way through the grass with nimble steps, shoving those pods out of the way with his feet before he could put his weight on them. Dee wondered how often he’d stepped on them in dragging him to their shelter.

“What do you think a Scrab was doing out here?” Dee said, after they’d walked in silence long enough for the strain of staying awake to set in. He could stay awake for an entire day if he had to, before. But now, it couldn’t have been more than a couple hours before his head grew heavy. At least walking didn’t take as much energy as it would for Ben, he told himself. Better _he_ have the debilitating injury than someone who didn’t get around on a machine. He’d done the right thing.

“Huh?” Ben glanced over his shoulder as they walked.

“Scrabs like deserts. How’d one wander into a place like this?”

“Hmm…” Ben lapsed into silence for a while longer, and Dee leaned forward for a quick run to catch up to him. Ben shrugged when he came up beside him. “Dunno. Maybe there’s a colony from any survivors from the plant?”

“That works, I guess.”

“Why would a corporate bodyguard know anything about the local wildlife?”

“Thought of getting on the wrangling team if the bodyguard thing fell through once. Fleeches are everywhere, so, it helped to learn what _else_ you might go up against.”

“Why wrangling? You could get eaten!”

“But-” he approximated a pointing gesture with the butt of his gun. “I _wouldn’t_ be supervising people I’d be expected to hurt. I thought, if it went south, it’d be ‘cause I couldn’t pretend anymore, or rely on Aydik’s protection.”

“So, you had an idea in place, in case it was dangerous to stay…” Ben stared forward, at the scorched earth ahead as their path led through shorter and sparser blades of grass. They passed a single, skinny tree, and then there were no more. “I’ve never…worried about that. Never had to. I always felt welcome where I was.”

“You were lucky.”

They came to a stop at a large metal pipe that ran the length of the barren ground to a twisted metal skeleton of what once had been an enormous facility, rising out of the pool of its broken remains. Concrete and metal lay in mountains of charred heaps, any color there may have been scorched to dead black or rusted over. Dee watched Ben look on the site with a sort of profoundness in his eyes, as if he was absorbing something from the sight of the mess.

“Mr. Drunce said Mudokon Pops were Molluck’s idea. You said this place belonged to him?”

Dee gave a nod, his heart sinking for poor Ben. He thought of how much healthier Ben was, and wondered if there had been any pressure on Drunce to sell him off for food. Drunce seemed like the type to not mention that to Ben for his own protection. _He_ certainly wouldn’t.

And as he considered the thought of protecting Mudokons from the slaughter lines, it all sank in. It was always there in the open, but dissuaded from active attention. 

He thought of the worker revolt that had turned his and Aydik’s lives upside down, and for the first time examined it in further detail than the knowledge that Mudokons were routinely treated poorly by everyone around them. He had never needed to, but it seemed so obvious now. This is where the idea for Mudokon Pops began.

He thought of the moment of feeling _utterly doomed_ when he’d seen his missing arm, his mindless, awful spiral of panic, and imagined someone learning they were about to be chopped up would have felt much the same. That blue Mudokon surely hadn’t been given the time or relative peace to plan like they had. What factory Mudokon was ever given those things?

Had he known where he was going to go? Or was _out_ good enough for then?

“Yeah,” said Ben, his expression grim with whatever answers he had found. “Yeah, I was very, _very_ lucky.”

On an unspoken consensus, they followed the pipe to the wreckage of RuptureFarms 1029.

Dee climbed over the jagged metal with ease, his pants doing all the hard work of balancing without having to worry about sharp points. In contrast, Ben picked his way along behind him carefully, wincing and lifting his foot away from painful landings and stumbling over uneven ground.

Ben muttered unintelligibly to himself as they shoved aside a piece of metal too burned and twisted to identify. Dee tried to imagine him searching for other survivors, braving the splinters and smoke.

“Maybe I should’ve come alone,” he offered. “You can go back if you want.”

Ben shook his head. “You’ve gotta put your gun down to move anything. We’re not here to raid the stuff everyone else has picked through- _ow_!” He leapt back and fell over onto a flat section of what was once an elevator, holding his foot and dropping his bindle as he fell. “Ow, ow, ow…”

Dee leaned forward, charging over the debris to hover over him. “Hey, you okay? What’d you step on? Is it bleeding?” There would have been things much sharper than standard debris in this factory. Saws and grinders abounded in RuptureFarms, and the thought of Ben cutting himself open on a rusty old saw… “Maybe you really _should_ go back…”

Ben shook his head again, sucked in a breath through grit teeth, and turned his ankle to get a look at the underside of his foot. “It’s not…I don’t think I’m bleeding - not from that anyway.” He poked at the painful spot with a fingertip, lifted his paw to inspect it. “It was just narrow. Hurt a lot. A pole or something-…” he trailed off, looking at something on the ground behind Dee. “…or a spring. Was that a vendo?”

Dee stepped back and looked down at the twisted piece of machinery he stood on. The row of coiled springs _could_ have been a snack vendo… but from the looks of it, enough of it was above ground long enough for scavengers to have picked it clean. “Probably empty now,” he said.

“Let’s look at the rest of it, to be sure.” Ben got to his feet, wincing at the newly-tender part on his sole, and reached down for a piece of rebar out of the wreckage. Slowly, he picked his way down to where Dee stood, looking down and stepping lightly. He wedged the end of the rebar under the metal slab, and glanced at Dee. “This looks kinda heavy. Give me a hand?”

“Not like I can give you two,” Dee said. Ben whimpered quietly as he reached for the rebar. “It’s a joke, Ben. I was trying to make you feel better. …Make us both feel better, I guess.”

“Sorry- um… I guess I just…”

Dee felt bad for even trying. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go for it.”

They pushed down, straining. The metal had once been part of a security door, and didn’t easily budge. Dee’s feet slid in the scattered metal, and Ben gasped in pain.

“It’s gonna slice your hands up, Ben!”

“We lifted it a bit – that’s enough!”

“Enough for what?”

“Let go!”

Dee let go of the rebar at the command and Ben stepped back, pulling their improvised lever free. The vendo’s plastic cracked at the new impact and Ben scrambled over to the exposed portion, tearing at the newly-stressed covering and striking new cracks with the tip of the rebar piece.

“Aren’t you just gonna bring that door down on your hand?” Dee said.

“Not if I can…” Ben tore off a bit more plastic with a grunt and tossed it aside. He wedged the rebar piece into the machine to prop up the slab and gave Dee a triumphant grin. “See?” Slowly, he draped himself over the edge of the vendo, reaching into the depths of the machine under the fallen security door.

“Ben-…Ben, be careful.” Dee suddenly found it difficult to breathe. Was that enough? He was about to watch Ben lose an arm, himself, and there would be nothing he could do about it, it would happen too fast. 

“…Got something!” Ben cried triumphantly, standing up with a handful of the highly processed, shelf-stable version of Scrab Cakes. A little gray thing hung by prominent teeth to a corner of one of the pastries and Ben yelped, dropping it. Dee could swear his heart stopped beating for an instant.

The creature bounced onto its conjoined feet and scurried off with the pastry it clutched, vanishing into the ruins instantly.

“Oh, just a rat,” said Ben, swaying a bit with a sheepish grin. Dee gave a long sigh of relief and shook his head. Ben chuckled. “Don’t mind me, I haven’t slept well.”

“Surprised they didn’t take the rest of ‘em,” Dee said. “Think they’re getting food from somewhere else?”

“Yeah, that’s a mystery. It’s almost like this used to be a meat packing plant,” said Ben, smirking.

Dee scoffed. “Don’t give me that look. Who’s the one jumping at harmless little ratz?”

“The one who kinda expected he’d pull his hand out with a fleech attached,” Ben said, without dropping a bit of his humor.

“Come on. Fleeches don’t eat packaged-…” Dee blinked, shook his head. “Actually, they probably would, plastic and all.” 

Ben gave only an airy chuckle in response as he stooped down to retrieve the dropped packs.

“How’re they looking, Ben?”

Ben looked the pastries over and shook some packages free of dust and ash. “Looks like they’re all still sealed. We’ve got a bit more food.”

“Great. Let’s hope we can beat the little pests to more stuff.”

They picked through the mass of steel with disappointing results. Nothing but scrap metal they wouldn’t need, and more wounds to scar over on Ben’s feet. For a while, they tried to keep up conversation, but soon, Dee grew too exhausted to pay attention to anything Ben said. It was only when he bumped into him after a sudden halt that any amount of awareness returned to him.

“Hey, watch it,” said Ben, grasping at Dee’s shoulder to keep from falling over.

“Sorry,” said Dee, holding still until Ben was sure of his balance. “Why’d you stop?”

“I think we found your fuel,” said Ben, pointing at a faded scrap of cloth impaled on a jagged length of pipe. “That’s from a Glukkon’s suit. And Glukkons had to have bodyguards.”

Dee watched the scrap sway like a forlorn green flag. “With a revolt going on? Definitely had guards. So, you think there might be some bodies with intact pants. Kind of a crapshoot, but better than nothing.”

“Yeah! It’s worth a try. I, um…” He frowned, averting his eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to take those when I was looking for other survivors.”

“Only Sligs worry about a Slig’s fuel supply. Don’t worry about it.”

Ben gave him a distantly pained expression, otherwise difficult to read, and knelt down to start digging, setting his snack-laden bindle aside. “Time to dig up _more_ dead bodies, I guess…”

Ben sounded, in many ways, as exhausted as Dee felt. That pile of cloth he’d salvaged could have only been cut free from Glukkon corpses. How awful it must have been, searching desperately for life and finding none, and then having to gather supplies… He looked down at his remnant arm again. He doubted Ben knew how to amputate a limb beforehand. What an agonizing puzzle he’d had to solve. He could even remember, somewhat, the way he’d been _crying_ in the distant voice he’d heard through his nightmares. He felt bad for even _wanting_ to be angrier before.

“Dee?”

Dee looked up to see Ben crouched in the mess, looking up at him with those huge eyes full of guilt. He trudged over to him and managed to get his pants into an awkward kneel, his body heavy and uncoordinated. Setting his gun down to free his hand, he reached over to clasp Ben’s shoulder.

“Hey. You’re right. It can’t feel awful forever.”

Ben smiled a tight smile of withheld tears. “Thanks.” He sniffled. “Um, I think I’ve got something for you.” He gestured at his side, where a Slig skeleton lay sprawled in the wreckage, remarkably intact. “Can’t find the Glukkon that piece of cloth came from, but we have plenty of cloth. I, uh…think this,” he reached for another bit of metal, “might be another Slig’s foot. I’ll try to dig him up. Can you get this one’s fuel one-handed?”

Dee nodded. “Yeah. But, Ben? Promise me you’ll take a rest after all this.”

“Rest sounds nice,” Ben said, and turned to unearth the second Slig body. Dee didn’t bother calling him out on not answering him properly.

Getting the unfortunate guard’s fuel canister out of his pants one-handed proved trickier than he’d expected, but somehow, he managed. Actually loading it into his own pants would require Ben’s help, but for now it was enough to have the detached tank. _Thank laziness for shoddy modular design_ , he thought. If he couldn’t just remove the tank itself so easily, he’d be sunk.

By the time Ben had uncovered enough of the second Slig’s remains to get at the fuel, the sky had darkened to a rich crimson sunset, and a sliver of one moon or another was visible on the horizon. Dee could barely focus, and he had to direct Ben on removing the gas compartment after nearly stabbing himself with the bit of metal he was using as an improvised screwdriver.

As Ben was retying the bindle, he stopped and reached out to push the corpse aside, enough to pull a tattered piece of paper from under it. He stared at it in somber silence a moment before offering it to Dee.

It was a wanted poster of the revolt’s leader, perhaps one of the most famous wanted posters this side of Mudos. He’d seen reproductions of it on the news for a long time now, but with the weight of their realizations, it seemed different, somehow. It felt like something weighed on his chest as he gazed at the face of the Mudokon who had instigated such broad changes.

“What was going through your mind, huh, Abe? I bet it wasn’t as malicious as the news likes to say.”

Ben blinked back tears. “I’ll bet. ‘I want to survive’, ‘I want my friends to survive’. Powerful thoughts, more powerful than anything.” A pause, and a deep breath. “I resented him, you know. Bought into it all. Knew other Mudokons had it bad, but didn’t really…”

“We all bought into it,” said Dee. “Funny how perspective works. Knew what it was like to be afraid for my life, but…not like this. Death if you stay, death if you go…”

“So, we’re not going back to let you die?” Ben asked hopefully. 

Dee couldn’t bring himself to answer. He still wasn’t sure, himself. But he didn’t want to follow the tracks tonight.

A breeze stirred in the silence, carrying cool wind to comfort their weary bodies. It lifted the paper from Dee’s weak grasp, and carried it back the way they had come. They watched as it fluttered off into the darkening distance.

“Think he’s got the right idea,” said Dee, picking up his gun. “Let’s get out of here before we have to rely on my mask’s light. I’m _beat_.”

Together, they made their way from the ruins, carrying on their shoulders their new supplies and realizations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Oddworld: Does your "rat" pluralize with an S or a Z? I have seen both.
> 
> I picked Z and am sticking with it but oh my god.


	6. Chapter 6

Dee woke with the urgency of a scream trapped in his lungs, the nightmare of wailing brothers silenced forever between Skillya’s teeth still rattling in his mind like so many loose screws. He didn’t know whether it was a real memory ingrained in his nightmares, or a macabre mix of all the fears he’d had, all the deadly fates he had somehow evaded. It was hard to tell; it acted like any other dream in that the setting and circumstances changed each time. Sometimes he was an adult, returned to her for review or worse – discipline. Sometimes, he was a grub again. Every time, he watched others die for daring to be upset, scared, or sensitive. Every time, she reached for him next, screeching, _“Haven’t you made me suffer enough?”_

Every time, and especially tonight, on the heels of so much upheaval, it bore down on every nerve, leaving him scarcely able to breathe. He tried desperately to draw a full breath, and only managed after several attempts that left him feeling more drained than when he’d gone to sleep.

He looked up at the reflective glimmer of Mudokon eyes in the dark. “You’re having bad dreams, too, huh?” Ben asked him quietly.

“Nothing new,” he said, slowly propping himself up. “You let the fire go out.”

“Out of kindling. I forgot to gather more. It’s not too cold here, at least.”

“Oh. Damn.”

“When I-…” Ben’s eyes flicked away, stayed focused somewhere else. “At the explosion, you-…you were begging _your mother_ to stop. And, at the party, and then, just now…well, uh…it keeps happening,” he finished helplessly. “I guess the Slig queen’s not very nice?”

Swallowing bile, Dee shook his head. He knew the glow of his mask would convey it to Ben while he tried to work up the nerve to talk. “I talk in my sleep?” Had he been doing that his whole life? Had every Slig he’d shared a room with known the depth of his fear? Or was this new, something jarred loose as everything shattered around him? Once more, he instinctively reached to grasp an aching arm that wasn’t there, and his breath fled his lungs all over again.

“You didn’t last night, or while you were out.” 

He paused, waiting for a reply, but Dee couldn’t give one. Even the relief at not having done this the whole time got stuck in his throat.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

Dee shook his head vehemently, finally taking a deep breath to say something, but unable to make words with it.

“Okay. I don’t think you want to hear about my nightmares, either, so let’s just sit up for a while. Maybe one of us will calm down enough to sleep. Can I sit next to you?”

The question and Ben’s gentle tone did something he hadn’t expected, dragging the spinning wheels of his panic to something slow enough to breathe through. He nodded, and finally gave a breathless, “Yeah.”

Ben moved, and for a moment, Dee could only track him by sound, until he took a seat beside him, and the glow of his mask was reflected in the side of his nearest eye, a glint of red in the dark. Ben didn’t touch him, but in the utter darkness of night and mind, his presence was like an anchor, solid as any hand offered in support.

“There we go. We can talk if you want. Or just sit here. Either is fine.”

Dee nodded, but didn’t say anything. Ben seemed to take that as a cue to remain silent, himself, and time slowly passed. Nothing was happening, and yet, knowing he wasn’t alone made it all somehow different. Dee thought the term was _companionable silence_ , one of those things he understood was a concept, but never one that struck him as something that actually existed. Sitting in silence with others had always been tense, full of the fear that something he would do, or anything he would say, would bring all his flimsy shields crashing down. 

Like the “naïve younger sibling” idea, who would have thought it was real?

“Hey, Ben? I never thanked you for saving my life, huh?”

Ben shifted a bit, the reflection of his mask-light on his eyes shifting too as he glanced at him, barely turning his head. “Um, you never had to. I understand why you wouldn’t…”

“Thanks. Wouldn’t be here without you. Dunno what we’re gonna do, but I’m still here to be part of it for now, and that’s a few days longer than I would’ve been.”

Ben made a sound like a chuckle he’d thought better of, swallowed into his throat at the last second. “I wonder if we could just…do this. Learn how to hunt, raid the ruins until they have nothing to give, move on.”

“We’ll run out of ruins. RuptureFarms is backed into a corner in the middle of nowhere. The other things will have been picked over.”

“And by then, we’ll be better at fending for ourselves, anyway! Right?”

“ _You_ will. You can step back, look at a problem, and find all the little working parts you need for its solution. But once my pants run out of fuel and the battery dies, too, I’m dead weight. Sligs just weren’t _made_ to survive outside of society. Don’t wanna be a burden on you, you know?”

By the play of light on his eyes, Dee saw Ben shake his head. It was a while before he spoke.

“Maybe we’re thinking of the wrong society.”

“Huh? You mean something like, we should head west? Heard it’s nothing but dust and misery out that way. Still, ‘Clakker hospitality’ is a thing on TV…”

“What? No. Didn’t something happen out there?”

“Dunno. Never had any reason to look for news from way across the continent.”

“Me neither, I just remember seeing something about travel that way being disrupted once. Didn’t pay it any mind.” Ben shook his head again as if to force the tangent out of it. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant. Think about what you _did_ pay attention to in the news – those first two donations to the Lulu Fund. Where were they?”

“Uh, to the north? Where are you going with this?”

“Not just anywhere to the north – on top of and staffed from tribal Mudokon villages!”

“You mean ‘penniless Mudokons living off scraps’, right?” said Dee. He chuckled. “Far as classic ‘deceptions’ go, that one was pretty bad. The meepherds were still wearing tribal paint, for Odd’s sake!”

Ben snickered. “I remember that one. One of their huts was in the background. Points for trying?”

“I don’t think they _did_.” Another laugh and a little sniff. “Anyway, they don’t have tech, they wouldn’t be able to keep my pants running. And what makes you think they’ll trust a Slig and a civilized Mud?”

“Because they’re being _protected_ by a civilized Mud. Um…” Ben paused, and his eyes flicked away. “Wow, that sounds awful, actually. M-maybe we shouldn’t imply they’re not a proper civilization right to their faces, or, y’know, _at all_.”

It took Dee a second to catch the problem with his choice of words. If he were in their place, he wouldn’t be inclined to help a stranger crapping on his lifestyle for no reason, either. “Uh…yeah, probably not. My bad.”

“Mine too, really. I didn’t think about what you said at all until I said it for myself. We both probably did it all the time, but… Anyway, um…if we can _avoid_ insulting them while asking for help, I’m sure I can vouch for you! Let me be the advocate-person for once.”

“Wait, back up. They’re being protected by a ‘civilized’ Mud? You think that Abe guy is with the sav-…wait, _nuh-uh_ ,” he scolded himself for the slip, “tribal guys?”

“Where else would he go? Him and the, what- four, five, six hundred other Muds that have vanished without a trace wherever he goes? That’s a lotta people. Anyway, those two franchisees, remember _their_ workers just up and vanished, too? He’s looking out for them, maybe because _they’re_ looking out for _him_. Sooo…” he drawled it out playfully, his grin audible. “If they already know folks from the factories, they might be willing to help us!”

“Ben, you’re forgetting something…”

“Your pants, I know, I know. There’s nothing we can do about those, but here’s the thing – _you won’t be dead weight_. It won’t be just us! We’ll have access to any resources they’re willing to share, and I’m sure a bunch of heads put together could help you out when your pants fail you!”

Dee sighed heavily, trying to figure out what he could say. Ben was so excited, so _alive_ , after all the darkness and guilt before, and he didn’t want to ruin that. But he couldn’t agree. He wasn’t even worried about his mobility on this one - he was sure tribal or freed Mudokons ( _especially_ those) would kill him, after all the pain his kind had inflicted on theirs. But if he said that, that left the only solution that didn’t end in certain death the one that saw them wandering the wilderness alone for the rest of their lives. That was the one in which he lost any ability to care for himself or assist Ben within a couple weeks.

Just like before, the variable was the life _Ben_ would live. _Unlike_ before, one of their options sounded like he could live pretty well. Even if the Mudokons living out in nature had nothing to do with the fugitive and he just managed to _appear_ to protect his fellow Mud like some kind of superhero, maybe his fear of them not trusting Ben for where he came from was misplaced. He was so pleasant and nonthreatening, and Mudokons weren’t like Sligs - they weren’t taught to be the aggressors at all costs.

If there was a home for Ben that wouldn’t sap every iota of that light out of him, either through pain or loneliness, it would be with them. With death on all sides, the best way to go was away from most certain harm. _Out_ would have to be enough.

“You know what? Let’s go for it. It’s better than our other options.”

Ben relaxed – not in any way Dee could consciously name, but something in him _changed_ , a release of tension Dee hadn’t noticed at first. He could agree, honestly. They had a plan. One of them would find a home. After being afraid of dying for so long, knowing it was a certainty was almost a relief. Feeling he could do something productive with it was _definitely_ one.

“Who’d have thought we’d throw our lot in with a terrorist, huh?” Ben said, with another of those airy little laughs.

“Someone we _thought_ was one, anyway.”

Ben made a wordless noise of assent. “I guess we both have to question everything we thought we knew, if we wanna get along with these guys.”

They lapsed into silence, and in the newfound comfort of direction, Dee slept, slumping onto Ben’s shoulder.

\-----

She loomed in the wreckage of RuptureFarms, in obscuring silhouette in the dark of night. But there was no mistaking the bulk of a queen, and there was no mistaking the threat in her dark shape towering over him. He tried to move away, but again found himself pantsless, his body wedged tight into the skeleton of a vendo, springs holding him like shackles and biting into his skin.

“Sacrificing your time, your arm, you can make excuses for. You were drunk, you were given no time to think.” Her voice was warped, but still sounded like Skillya, her baleful glare piercing him through even though he couldn’t see it.

The insinuation to return, to cover for his actions and cowardice and try to reclaim the life he’d managed to sustain was undeniably tempting in its familiarity. It was possible he was wrong about death in the “civilized” world being certain for him, this was true.

But for the first time in his life, he’d found something that he’d never dreamed of. Someone whose fate mattered to him as much as his own, if not more. Someone with happiness left in his soul that he had to protect, who had shown him kindness for its own sake. Someone who accepted and celebrated who he was.

Not like her. Not like any Slig he’d ever known.

As if she had heard the thought, Skillya let out a screech, and the warping in her voice clarified into something more familiar, something that haunted his memories and nightmares.

“ _This_ , this is a willing choice. Would you dare!? You _dare_ turn your back on me? _Haven’t you made me suffer enough?”_

She reached for him. Her too-large hand engulfed his view and the weight of her grip encased his head. His skull began to crack, an awful, painful crunch.

He snapped awake, blinking in the pale light of dawn, fighting to keep his breathing and shivering under control.

As reality began to assert itself, he found he was alone, curled up on the ground at the edge of the creeping light from the rising sun outside. He didn’t recall being disturbed.

A few more moments to quiet his lungs and mind, and his ears caught gentle whistling from just outside the hollow. With some help from his arm, he got himself to his feet and headed outside to investigate.

Ben sat in a crouch just outside the hollow, eyes up at the treetops, whistling into the morning light. He paused as Dee emerged, and greeted him with a smile.

“Morning,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Singing back to the birds.” Something chirped and twittered above them, and Ben whistled back in some kind of approximation. He giggled softly, an endearingly simple smile on his face. “I missed this. I used to do it all the time, back at the vineyards.”

“It really _does_ feel like a whole other lifetime already, doesn’t it?” Dee said. He watched an enormous rat waddle through the brush, carrying the wanted poster that had flown away from them. Nesting material, possibly, if they reproduced the way birds did. Ben paused to watch it, too, and chuckled. “We haven’t been away from it that long,” Dee concluded when the distraction was out of sight.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Ben. “After-…well, when one of the papers – _The_ something _Times_ \- published that ‘crazy coincidence’ of bird infestations just before workers vanished? You know, the one nobody took seriously? When a paper called the _Daily Deception_ is laughing at you, you’re probably being really stupid, right?”

“You’d think, yeah,” said Dee.

“Well, it was the one thing Mr. Drunce ever reacted to. He told me he felt it was the only thing he _could_ do, because the answer to anything else was ‘more guns and bombs’, and that would make things more dangerous for us. So he bought some bird traps for us to set up. And…” He looked up at the trees again, and for a moment they listened to the morning birdsong in silence.

“You didn’t get to sing to the birds anymore,” said Dee.

Ben shook his head with a sad smile. “He apologized to me for it – he always thought it was cute when I did - but he was just _that_ afraid of Abe coming in to kidnap us.”

In this silence, Dee felt they were both thinking the same thing: if Abe’s only motive had been freeing his fellow Mudokons from their typically awful conditions, would he have even bothered with ones like Ben, who seemed to be treated well?

But Ben proved to be thinking something slightly different. “I wonder if-…” His gaze drifted far away, into memory. “I wonder - if someone _wanted_ to go, would Mr. Drunce still call it kidnapping?” His breath hitched as he inhaled deeply, and Dee reached down to rest a hand on his shoulder. “He’s-he’s gone, now. He raised me, you know. _Personally_ , not through a supervisor. And now-… _now_ …”

Dee could only stand in silent support as Ben let himself mourn, sobs so quiet as to have almost no sound at all, as if they were pulled from somewhere so deep his throat could give them none. When his tears finally slowed, he covered Dee’s hand with his paw for a pat of silent thanks. Dee gave his shoulder a squeeze as if to say, _anytime_ , a silent conversation he’d never learned how to have, but his heart still somehow knew.

After a moment to gently unravel the lingering hurt, where Dee lifted his hand away and Ben shifted, watching the birds in the trees again, he began answering their calls once more.

Dee rocked forward hard enough to override his stabilizers and plopped down on his stomach beside Ben. His mind drifted away from incessantly dwelling on fear of doom, slowing down for once and taking in the forest. Golden rays of sunlight poked through the trees, the shadows of leaves dancing in pools of light, and above it all, the melodic call and response between the birds and the friend he had committed to protect.


	7. Chapter 7

Ben would sing to the birds every morning, and if Dee closed his eyes, he could lose himself in the ambient sound and the sun on his skin.

It was easy, in those first couple days, to forget the odds against them. There was something _liberating_ about these treks with Ben in otherwise complete solitude. As long as he didn’t look while Ben changed his dressing, and didn’t think too hard about running out of supplies, it was almost like a vacation. Dee hadn’t even realized how _draining_ his life had been, how much energy he had spent every day, just keeping up the bare minimum of his charade. How much his mind had occupied itself with fear of discovery as psychologically unfit.

It was easy to forget in those first days, even when the indicator lights on his pants changed from green to yellow, then blue to indicate the battery had taken over. Ben was quick to notice, and his pointing it out sent uneasy waves into the relative calm he’d enjoyed.

“So, do we just…swap out the canisters?” Ben asked as he pulled one of their salvaged tanks from their supplies.

“Nah, those don’t have the sensors that’ll make the lights work. You’ll have to open it up and pour it into mine. Want me to bail out?” Dee set his gun down in preparation.

“I think you’re okay where you are. I can take the tank off to refill it, right? Just like the ones we took these from?”

“I guess. Just be careful with the connector.” 

“Okay. What made you decide to upgrade your pants instead of your gun, anyway?” Ben asked as he worked at the mechanism holding his tank in place. “Even if they never used them, Sal and the other guards loved saving up for new guns.”

“Less interested in guns than avoiding looking like an idiot. Ever see a Slig get his feet caught on something – wire, shrubbery, or whatever – that all it would take was a twist of the ankle to get out of? Too bad most pants don’t have those.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother them that much.”

“They learn to laugh off those things, I guess. Just insult each other about it, ‘til it doesn’t matter anymore, and, uh…that’s not for me.”

Ben paused a bit, and the smell of fuel exposed to air wafted to his nose. “Ugh. This stuff is pretty gross, actually. Never seen it outside a hose.”

“Yeah, there’s a reason for that,” said Dee. “Careful with it, make sure it all goes inside the tank. All it’ll take is a stray drop and a spark to set my ass on fire.”

“No pressure at all,” said Ben. Dee could _hear_ the faint smile and roll of his eyes. “Don’t worry, Dee. I’ve got you.” He paused, concentrating, and Dee glanced back after a bit to see him coaxing the last drops from the salvaged tank. Ben looked up as he capped it. “It doesn’t sound like you got along with other Sligs. Were you able to have any friends at all? Do anything with them?”

“I could play cards,” he said, with a shrug. “I have a great poker face.”

Ben laughed that light little chuckle of his, and set his tank back in place. The indicator lights on his pants turned a healthy green, and they shared a thumbs-up before Dee retrieved his gun.

“Maybe they’ll have cards at their village,” Ben said. “You can teach me how to play.”

“Maybe. Let’s focus on getting there first,” Dee said. It didn’t matter; he wouldn’t survive meeting those Mudokons. But…

It was best to put it out of his mind, and move on. Best to enjoy what he could, of this fleeting freedom in the interim.

\-----

By the next day, he had reclaimed that faint sense of the calm he’d decided must be _peace_ in the knowledge that Ben would be safe, even that light of kindness inside him. Ben had been sheltered from the awful lives most Mudokons had led, he had grown up with love instead of pain, and something deep inside Dee’s heart longed to protect it, this rare thing denied so many in their world. It had been denied to _him_ , and it had been expected of him – demanded of him – that he deny it to others in turn. It had always felt wrong; he had always been the fake, the pretender, looking over his shoulder in fear of being caught in his pacifism. And this feeling now, of being and doing _right_ – what was that, if “peace” wasn’t the right word for it?

But nothing was free. In contrast were the pain in his arm, physical or otherwise, and the times he would drift awake and hear Ben crying quietly. Despite its idyllic moments, the road ahead would be a hard one, and no amount of finding bits of himself he hadn’t known would change that.

This was driven home with complete certainty when they ran out of Scrab Cakes, and there were no more lucky finds in sight.

“Now what?” Dee asked as Ben shoved the last of the plastic wrappers back into the bindle with the others – anything and everything might have a use someday, after all.

“I’ve been watching the ratz,” Ben said, approaching a tree with a berry-bearing vine snaking up its trunk. “I think I have an idea of what we can eat. There are things that even _they_ avoid. I think if we stick to the stuff they do, we’ll probably be okay.”

“You know ratz’ll eat anything, right? Even dead things,” said Dee. “Pretty sure we can’t eat carrion without getting sick.”

Ben looked at him over his shoulder, poised to climb the trunk. “Um… Okay, how about I eat things we aren’t sure about first?”

Suddenly, he was all too aware of his pounding heart. That was _not_ what he’d wanted his caution to turn into. “Wait, what? No! No way am I gonna let you be a lab-fuzzle for me!”

“We’ve gotta eat _something_ to survive, Dee.” Ben gave him a warm smile that came with an uneasy flicker in his eyes. “If we make a mistake, it’s better if only one of us suffers for it.”

_You say that like your suffering doesn’t hurt me, too,_ Dee thought, but he lowered his head in resignation without voicing that thought. Ben was stubborn, and right about needing food. He was more agile and dexterous – and was more observant. Dee hadn’t even thought to watch the wildlife.

“I’ll be okay, Dee. I’ve got a good feeling about this!” Ben said. Dee looked up to see him flash a thumbs-up before he climbed swiftly up the tree, paws scrabbling on the bark. “Do me a favor,” he called down once he’d hoisted himself into the first fork up, “and put one of the fabric bits we haven’t used under me! I can drop some of the berries down without getting them dirty.”

“Why aren’t you getting the ones from the trunk?” Dee called back, setting his gun down to do as he asked anyway.

“I want to leave some for the ratz, of course! They can’t reach these up here, so it’s only fair, right?”

Dee chuckled softly at that. He wouldn’t have even thought of sharing nicely with vermin… But then, how, exactly, did everyone else see Mudokons? Grateful his wince wouldn’t be visible to Ben, he finished finding a scrap of cloth that wasn’t too small and carried it to the tree. “How’s this?”

Ben gave him another thumbs-up, and crawled out onto the branch, plucking berries from the vine and dropping them onto the target Dee had set out. He seemed fairly comfortable up there, sure in his movements and steady even on the narrow branches. He couldn’t have known his talents, but it still made Dee feel sheepish for worrying for him.

“You’re a natural climber, Ben.”

Ben laughed. “Yeah! I climbed all sorts of things as a little fledgling. I’ve always liked it. It…made me ideal for setting up those bird traps, high up on poles and stuff.”

Dee heard Ben’s voice waver, and he subconsciously reached to rub an arm that was no longer there. He cursed himself for that as the reminder graced him with another lance of pain.

He looked up to see Ben looking down at him, in that sorrowful, pitying way he was both aggravated and touched by. “Maybe they’ll have some kind of technique for helping with the pain,” he said. “I’m sure losing limbs is something they’ve dealt with.” He dropped to the ground with a grunt, and reached for some of their harvested berries. “We’ll figure it out, okay? We’ll survive.”

“I hope so,” Dee said, fighting the urge to tell him not to eat the berries he put in his mouth. He felt so guilty for stifling it, he had to offer a compromise. “Look, I’ll…I’ll test the next thing, okay? Don’t want you taking all those risks for me.”

“Dee, you risked your _life_ for me,” said Ben mid-chew. He swallowed the berries and added, “Besides, your body’s dealing with a big enough shock already, isn’t it? You shouldn’t get sick on top of that. I’m pretty healthy, I think I can handle our mistakes.”

Dee’s first instinct was to say no, that wasn’t right. But he felt bad about trying to tell him how much he didn’t want him to suffer for his sake. He was just so eager to be useful, so filled with guilt over what he’d had to do to save him. Should he be making him feel guiltier? Should he saddle him with the fact that he didn’t expect to survive with him, and dash that hope he’d held on to?

As the day wore on, Ben showed no ill effects from the berries. Maybe things that were toxic to ratz were toxic to Sligs and Mudokons, too. Maybe Ben had the right idea all along, watch and follow those who _did_ get by. It was how he’d managed to blend in just enough among other Sligs, hiding behind the behavior of those crueler than he was.

The burden of his misgivings was lightened as he fell asleep that night by their campfire, only for his mind to punish itself for daring to hope with yet another nightmare.

She loomed, a twisted shape among the dark trees. Horns or a headdress gave the impression of a giant gnarled claw hovering above him, ready to crush him. This queen wasn’t a Slig, wasn’t his mother, but the primal terror that froze him from the inside out was so similar it hardly mattered. Moonlight glinted off glazed yellow eyes and ribs exposed from flesh rotting away, hints of further horror lurking in the dark.

He was secured into his pants this time, upright and capable, except there was no comforting light from the indicators. They were dead, and wouldn’t carry him anywhere. All he could do was stare up at the zombie Mudokon queen and hope she didn’t try to kill him.

“Reduced to the basest instincts of flight from threat, your inhibitions lowered by drinking…” Her voice reverberated in his chest like the shockwave of an explosion. “Your immediate actions were to save the life of another.”

It took a monumental effort to force the words from his mouth. “He’s a Mudokon, he’s one of yours. Are you saying I did the wrong thing?”

“If you could pause time, or see the future so that you were prepared. If you could deliberate. Would you have made that choice? Would you not have saved yourself if you’d been given the time or space to _think_?”

Dee couldn’t find the words to respond, his chest tightening in fear as he replayed the event in his mind again, that moment where Ben was ready to run back to the party to warn everyone. If he’d had the luxury of deliberating between saving him and guaranteeing his own safety, would his choice have been the same?

Try as he might to convince himself it didn’t matter, he couldn’t say it would have. He had been focused on his own self-preservation for so long…

Something above him moved sharply in the dark. Again, as if his thoughts had been heard, the queen reached for him. He tried to scream but could only let out a breathless squawk. He smacked the emergency eject button on his pants but the mechanism failed, springs cutting deep into his tail. The queen’s paw closed around his body and squeezed, a long, jagged nail thrusting deep into his abdomen.

He startled awake, still trying to scream and only producing ragged gasps. His stomach hurt, the same roiling, nauseous ache that had plagued him since this all began. He heaved, but the only thing that came up was air as he lay shivering in fear in the grass.

By degrees, reality asserted itself; darkness resolved into fire and starlight, and the wind chilled his sweat-soaked body. He lifted his head to confirm his pants were still functioning, their light the comforting green of a well-fueled tank.

Ben wasn’t standing over him in response to his distress, and when he searched for him, he saw him standing at the edge of the campfire’s light, looking up at the sky with a raised paw, his face the distant expression of a Mud lost in himself.

He didn’t even respond to the sound of Dee’s approach as he joined him in looking up through a gap in the canopy at the moon, branded with the shape of a Mudokon paw.

Maybe it would be all right after all, if he were to die on the way, to succumb to infection or poison or wildlife, so long as Ben lived. For simply being what he was, he was never alone. Some spirit or another had decided to say _I will always be here for you_ , a hand offered in support in the dark of night for all time.

As soon as he had the thought, he felt guilty for it. Ben so vehemently cared about what happened to him that he had refused to go back to the society they knew not because of the way he would be treated as a Mudokon, but because _he_ said he didn’t think he would be allowed to live. He so cared for his life he had carried out unspeakably grim tasks for a Mudokon as sheltered as him, all to save him. 

His willingness to risk poisoning himself to spare him wasn’t a sense of his own life being worth less, as it would be for him in his place. It was because _he_ mattered to Ben.

But _why_ , asked his cynical self-loathing, would he matter to anyone? 

Because he had been reluctant to hurt him. Because stripped down to instinct alone, he had saved his life instead of his own. When consciously, he may not have – if he’d been allowed to make a more deliberate decision, he would probably have let him die. Ben’s care was so misguided, wasn’t it? He didn’t have a disapproving matriarch to haunt his dreams with truth at hand.

What a wonderful thing it was that he had this extra support from this nameless, powerful spirit on any night he could see this moon.

“The vineyards didn’t have a night shift,” Ben said, without looking away from the moon. “Everyone got to go to sleep at night, except that newer guard, Sheth, and he volunteered. I learned that was a luxury. But it means I never saw this. I only heard about it in bits and pieces. Rumors, y’know.”

He glanced down at Dee, and something sad crept into his eyes and tightened the corner of his mouth. He lowered his paw.

“My paw doesn’t quite fit,” he said, giving Dee a faint smile.

“Doesn’t fit? It doesn’t _fit_?” His stomach cramped and he winced, but spoke through the pain anyway. This was more important than his body protesting stress or dinner. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Some, some _spirit_ , something we can’t see or touch, something _powerful_ , cares about you guys so much they decided to _carve a hand on a moon_ for you. No matter how bad you hurt, you’ll always have that to reach for. _Always_. And you’re worried about it _not matching_?”

Ben was silent for a while, and Dee could see in his eyes the same dawning comprehension he’d seen as they took in the sight of the RuptureFarms ruins. The pain in his stomach gradually faded, and Ben finally spoke.

“You think-…y’think I’m…spitting on something I should be grateful to have.”

“Yeah, exactly!”

“You never had anything like it, not once in your life.”

And there it was, in words and sound. It ran him through more effortlessly than any zombie queen’s claw ever could. His heart felt like it had been dropped into a compactor, and tears stung his eyes. His mouth worked, but his mind stalled.

Ben reached out to put an arm around his shoulders.

“Wouldn’t be a very good guardian spirit if they didn’t want to protect our friends, too, would they?” He raised his free paw to the moon again, the arm around his shoulders including him now, in whatever he was asking for.

He really _was_ like one of those precocious, naïve, but so sweet younger siblings in TV families. They were supposed to be fake. Archetypes made for entertainment. But here Ben was, real and solid and caring.

He didn’t deserve it. But he couldn’t bring himself to refuse it or say that. Was he greedy or selfish for enjoying someone caring about him so much, when he might have chosen to abandon him?

And still, something in him refused to pull away from it. As Ben had said, he’d never had anything like it. It was the same pull that drew him away from his patrol route, from the duty he clung to for survival, into the comfortable little circle of chairs at the party. Like a chunk of iron introduced to a magnet, once this force had been found, it could not be escaped, it could not be forgotten.


	8. Chapter 8

Dee slept soundly for the first time he could ever recall, when they returned to their campfire. No nightmares, no pain, no waking up unable to breathe. Slumber was a warm sleeping bag, cocooning him away from all the hurt and panic.

He woke to a silent forest, Ben’s quiet snoring the only sound. Dee propped himself up and felt a grin tug at his mouth as he saw his friend sleeping deeply, himself. Ben had always seemed to be awake when he was, and he’d honestly worried he wasn’t sleeping at all. He was glad his silent prayer to the Mudokon Moon had given him peace as well.

It was light enough to start moving, but he should let Ben sleep, he thought. He reached for their supplies for the berries they had remaining, leaving half for Ben.

Ben woke with a stretch and a yawn before long, smiling as he sat up. “Mornin’, Dee. That-…um.” He frowned, and looked up at the trees. “Why aren’t the birds singing today?”

Dee shrugged. “Maybe they needed some peace and quiet, too?” he said through a mouthful of berries.

“I don’t think birds work that way…I’ve never heard them _not_ sing.” He got up and started to gather up their supplies. “I think we should get going, I’m not sure this-…”

“Wasn’t _I_ the one who was supposed to worry too much?” said Dee, picking up his gun and resting it on his shoulder.

“You know it as well as I do, Dee. People don’t stop acting the way they do for no reason, why aren’t animals the same?”

Ben was probably right, he thought, shivering as the silence suddenly seemed more eerie than peaceful. “But if the small things are all quiet and hiding…” he began.

A handful of ratz darted out of the shadows, scurrying past them with frightened squeaks. An eerie Scrab howl followed, far too close.

“Trying not to be breakfast!” he said. “Let’s go!”

They took off running as a Scrab leaped out of the deep shadows in pursuit of the ratz. It gave several low, chirping barks and another howl as it realized it had found larger prey. Dee leaned into his run, branches whipping him harshly in the face as they tried to lose the thing by weaving between the trees.

“Up into a tree, Ben! They can’t climb!”

“You think I can climb that fast!?”

They leapt a fallen tree trunk, which posed absolutely no obstacle to the Scrab’s muscular legs. “Well, we can’t _run_ that fast!”

Every time he turned his head to see how fast the Scrab was gaining on them, it was always _too fast_. The foliage slowed it down somewhat; it was made to cross flatter and sparser terrain, but it was still a force to be reckoned with. If he had both hands to brace his gun with, he would just turn and shoot, but if he did now, his shot might go wide and dislocate his remaining arm to boot.

A collection of webs in the mouth of a hollow log at the base of a tree caught his eye. It might be a small Paramite nest; they might be able to buy them some time, if he could pit them against the Scrab.

“Jump that log, get up that tree!”

“Dee?”

“Just trust me! And get ready to catch me!”

Ben leapt onto the log and again onto the trunk of the tree, clinging to anything he could hold on to. He dropped their supplies to scramble upwards. If Dee messed this up, he wouldn’t make it to safety.

Dee was close behind, but his aim was somewhat different – his mechanical feet hit the log and he jumped again, trying to flush out the Paramites inside. 

The log splintered under their weight and force, and thick white webbing shot from the cracks, wrapping around his legs as several much smaller arachnids swarmed from the break. 

_Bolamites!_ Unexpected, but they’d work, too. The Scrab stopped to wail a triumphant howl, and charged, bearing down on prey it thought was caught.

Dee hit the emergency eject with the butt of his gun and held it high as his pants launched him clear. Ben caught the barrel of his gun and hauled him up into the branches, an arm wrapped solidly around him as soon as he was level to carry him higher up.

The Scrab lunged with a clear shot at Ben’s trailing foot, knocking Dee’s pants clear to land on the log. It landed in the midst of the agitated bolamites and found itself toppling, its legs bound against one another as their webbing coiled around its lower half. It chirp-barked in frustration, snapping at the bolamites as they fled up the tree trunk, skittering up past the pair. Ben watched them pass, breath heaving in terror in time with Dee’s own as they both looked back down to watch the bound Scrab through the leaves.

It bent its neck and began cutting its way through the webbing around its legs with its sharp beak. “Guess we can’t say it’s safe to go back down,” said Ben.

“Maybe it’ll wander off,” said Dee. “It can’t get us up here.”

The Scrab slipped its legs free and righted itself with a frustrated shake of its head. It let out an angry howl and began prowling around the tree, occasionally chirping indignantly very much in their direction. It would pause for several moments, then howl at them before making another circuit around the tree.

“C’mon,” Dee said. “Go away, already! You’re not catching us, piss off!”

It howled, as if to say _like hell!_ and leapt at the tree trunk, striking it with its forelegs and loudly carving deep gouges in the bark.

Ben whimpered. “Should’ve said ‘please’?”

Dee shook his head. “Ugh. We can’t stay up here forever,” he said. “My pants and the rest of our stuff are down there. And ‘less we want to try eating raw bolamites, there’s no food up here, either.”

“Can we shoot it? I could be your other hand.”

Dee looked doubtfully at his gun, then down at the Scrab. “Might be the only thing we _can_ do. We’ll probably starve before it does. Find somewhere to brace your shoulder, these guns have some kick.”

Ben slid down towards that sturdy first fork again. The Scrab leapt up, and Ben yelped, pulling his feet back as its beak just barely missed his toes, with the log that was once the bolamites’ home as a step.

“Too low, too low!” Dee said.

“Do _you_ see a better place? Besides, remember how your leg broke through that log?”

The Scrab pranced in place in what looked for all the world like giddy anticipation. Ben carefully slid down again, and the Scrab charged once more. Ben withdrew his feet, and this time it was Dee who cried out in alarm, nearly dropping his gun for the instinct to cling to the nearest branch. “Swear to Odd, Ben, whatever you’re planning…”

“Trust me!” Ben said. Again, he baited the Scrab. Again, the Scrab lashed out.

This time, its claws broke through the top of the log and it let out an indignant bark as it faltered. It howled in fury as it tried to pull itself free, the wood splintering around its legs. Its efforts caused its rear legs to break through, too, and suddenly its leverage was gone.

“Now’s our chance!” Ben said. Again, he scooted down into the fork between thick branches. This time, the Scrab could not pounce again. But the wood that bound its legs was cracking with every bit of its struggle.

Ben propped him up on his leg with his arms under his shoulders. Dee fought the instinct to take the trigger with a hand he no longer had and shifted his grip, awkward, off-handed.

The log beneath them cracked again, and the Scrab barked at them. Ben was shivering in fear behind him.

Ben put his paw where his own hand had originally been, and for an absurd moment it almost seemed as if Ben’s limb was his own. Then the illusion broke as he nudged Ben’s arm with the remains of his own to adjust his aim, biting back a whimper at the pain of jarring it.

“Ready!” he said. He felt Ben tense, and he pulled the trigger. Ben grunted in pain as the recoil pushed him back against the tree, but it was nearly drowned out in the Scrab’s howl of agony as it toppled, crumpling where it stood. It ineffectually twitched, blood soaking the grass and splinters under its head as it desperately tried to coordinate its body.

It shrieked and howled, flailing, but not dying. A nameless, painful cold spread in Dee’s chest as he watched the thing writhe.

“Oh, Odd, _listen_ to it,” Ben whispered in horror.

Dee let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding. “I’d rather not. Ready!”

Ben tensed behind him, shifting to better accommodate the shock this time, and Dee nudged his aim towards the incapacitated Scrab’s head. He fired again, and this time the Scrab jerked and went limp.

Again, they were silent in death’s wake, the newfound silence consuming them for several long moments. 

Tentatively, a bird somewhere chirped, and Ben let out a shaky breath. Tucking Dee close against his still-shivering body, he descended to the ground, stepping gingerly over the splintered wood.

He set Dee down in a relatively clear area, and he curled up on the ground, watching as Ben untied the knife from his waist and bent to start cutting away the bolamite webbing on his pants. He couldn’t stop shaking, and he noticed Ben’s paw tremble as he worked.

“Guess-…guess we’re a little less vulnerable than we thought,” he said, trying to take his mind off the Scrab’s pained thrashing. Both their minds, probably.

“A little, yeah,” Ben said, with a glance over his shoulder. It was bruising where the recoil had shoved him into the bark. “I’m not sure how well we could do that on the ground. With our height difference…” He rolled his shoulder with a grimace. “…Maybe we can figure something out later.”

“Yeah, later,” Dee said, as Ben got back to work. He cut the last bit free, and stood to secure the knife to his waist again. “It’ll only work while I have ammo left, anyway. And we’re bound to waste some, ‘cause I’m firing from the wrong hand.”

“The tribal Mudokons manage without guns, somehow,” he said. “They had to figure it out in the beginning, too, probably. Maybe we’ll have the same luck!”

“Not sure they were fighting Scrabs like this,” Dee said, looking up at Ben as he carried his pants over. He set them down and he uncurled to help him reset the ejection mechanism, as well as he could with only one hand. It mostly consisted of directing Ben.

“What do you mean?” Ben asked, watching Dee maneuver himself into his pants. Dee reached down to secure himself in, breathing a quiet sigh of relief as the indicators lit up.

Ben stepped back to let him stand and run through the test. “I mean,” Dee said, as he ticked off each motion in his mind, “I expected Paramites, not bolamites and Scrabs. Scrabs live in deserts, remember? Whatever tricks they might’ve found might not work.”

“Where _are_ all the Paramites, anyway, if they’re supposed to live here?” Ben asked.

Dee concluded the test with a hop. “Dunno. Maybe the Scrabs let loose from RuptureFarms ate ‘em all?”

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that explanation even though he’d offered it. Could Scrabs beat Paramites on their own turf? Is that why the bolamites had taken over their hiding places? Or were bolamites more widespread than he assumed? They were nuisances at worst, he hadn’t done much further reading on them than was relevant to the major predators he might find alongside fleeches.

He shook his head to try to clear what he thought must be a pointless reverie, and looked up to see Ben gazing solemnly at the felled Scrab.

“I hope-…if we’ve gotta do it again, we can make it faster.” He picked his way to it, through the splinters and blood, and knelt beside it, resting a paw on its hide. “I’m sorry. You were in a lot of pain for a bit, there. Nobody deserves that.”

The noise from his pants scared a couple of ratz inching out of the underbrush to investigate, and Ben watched him approach over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure what to say. Death had seemed like a mercy for the beast.

“I hate to say it, since we’re sitting here feeling sorry for it, but… We should eat it,” he told him. “Who knows where we’re gonna find this much food at once again?”

Ben grimaced, but nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Hope I don’t hit the intestines again…”

“What? Oh. That-…hadn’t been a whole Scrab. I’d _wondered_. Thanks for not trying to salvage it anyway…pretty sure eating shit wouldn’t have helped us.”

Ben chuckled, clearly despite himself. “Probably not. All right now, let me concentrate, okay?”

Concentration wasn’t worth much, with subpar tools and experience. It was a long, frustrating, _disgusting_ endeavor, and Dee had nothing to offer in help.

Soon enough, Ben made a mistake. He hissed in frustration, smacking the side of his head, and he immediately scrubbed at the bloody pawprint with his forearm, smearing it over both his head and arm. “Yuck. Ugh, I can’t believe I did it again.”

“You didn’t make a living carving these things up. Weren’t _you_ the one reminding me I’m not psychic?”

Ben laughed, with just enough bitterness to make him uneasy. “Yeah, yeah…” With a tired sigh and shake of his head, he looked up at the glowing green rat eyes in the shadows. “You guys can have what we can’t, I guess.”

“That’s the spirit,” Dee said, hoping to encourage him back to his usual levity. “They gotta eat, too, right?”

“Yeah…everyone’s gotta eat.” Ben tried for a smile, but it was clear he was too exhausted for one. “I’ll cut out what I think I can.”

Dee tried to tell himself that he wasn’t doing to Ben what he was afraid any other Slig would do, that the light and love he felt so protective of were still in place.


	9. Chapter 9

Ben’s exhaustion seemed to even out over time, though they both jumped at every Scrab call they heard. Every so often they would find tracks in the soft ground, pointed claws sinking low on terrain they weren’t made for. They changed course to avoid them so often, Dee wondered if they were still going the right way.

His fuel indicators were yellow when they finally broke through the trees.

The sun was sinking into a brilliant crimson twilight, its last rays touching the stretch of grassy plain ahead of them in dusky gold as the grass rippled in the wind like the shimmering of silk. The northern mountain range rose high at its end, an imposing compass that proved Dee’s fears unfounded, silhouetted ethereal purple in the fading light.

“Wow,” said Ben, grinning in sheer breathless delight at the new vista. “It’s so pretty out here!” He took a few steps out into the open plain, arms wide as if embracing it all.

The sheer openness of the space was breathtaking, in a very good way. There were countless miles between him and anyone who would order him killed for being who he was. Danger would make itself known well before being on top of them. It was just _gorgeous_ , and Ben was so happy.

Ben raced ahead, practically bouncing as he plopped down in a patch of pale yellow flowers, giggling in exhilaration. He reached down to cup one between his fingers, turning his grin from the bloom to Dee as he joined him. He sat beside him, and promptly sneezed as the wind blew their pollen into his unacclimated face.

Ben giggled at that, too. He couldn’t be too annoyed. He still had happiness in him, after all.

“Used to wonder why anyone would ever wanna go out here,” Dee said. “There’s nothing here. But, you know what? _Nothing_ is all right, sometimes.”

“Yeah,” said Ben, leaning back on his paws. “It’s peaceful. I mean, yeah, I miss having a bed and shelter and reliable food, but…” He shook his head. “This is- it’s scary, but…I dunno, Dee, I’m glad I’m out here.” He watched the grass wave in the wind in silence for a while, and Dee didn’t want to break it. It was enough to just _exist_ in peace. 

Ben’s mind was going somewhere else, however. “I had it really good back home, though. Does that mean I…” He looked up at the sky, then back at Dee, before his eyes flicked away in guilt. “I had it _good_ , I was healthy, I was- respected, cared for. Other Mudokons didn’t have that. Should I be happy to be out here? Am I ungrateful?”

Dee let out a long sigh, trying to ignore that painful spark of envy deep in his chest. He wasn’t a Mudokon, but he had been more miserable than he’d ever let himself recognize. Living each day with the fear of fatal discovery, pretending to be something that made his blood run cold. Pretending not to feel the pain of others, pretending to revel in it. Ben had been encouraged to love, to sing, to laugh, to _care_.

“Well… I mean…my gut says yes, but- _augh!”_ His stomach cramped like it was trying to wring itself out, worse than it had ever been. He sucked in hissing breaths through the pain, eyes watering.

“Dee!?” Ben reached for him, but his paws on his back and shoulder couldn’t do anything for the pain.

Slowly, it began to subside, and Dee took several deep breaths, shaking. “Holy shit,” he breathed when he was finally able to form words.

“I think your gut might actually be saying _no_ ,” Ben joked halfheartedly. 

Dee shook his head wordlessly, needing another moment to catch his breath. “I hope it wasn’t something we ate.”

“You had bad stomachaches after drinking the brew, too.”

“Can’t be the brew, it’s been too long. I’d have pissed all that out of my system days ago now.” He took another deep breath and let it out slowly. “Just…keep an eye on yourself, okay? If it was something we ate, you’ll get hit, too.”

And yet, nothing further happened to either of them as sunset gave way to night, and the moons rose into the sky. Dee looked up at the Mudokon paw branded on one’s face and thought of the timing of all his stomachaches since the explosion, and the nightmare in the woods. _Something_ out there favored Mudokons… 

As they settled down in the grass, small, luminescent insects rose up and flew about, living sparks against the night.

“Oh, how pretty. Hello, friends,” Ben said, reaching out for one. A tiny arc of electricity leapt from its glowing rear to his finger. “Ow!” Ben withdrew his paw, sticking the affected finger in his mouth.

“You think it knows the difference between you and some hungry bird?” Dee said.

He’d expected _some_ kind of remark, but Ben was silent, flexing his zapped paw.

Dee pushed himself up onto his elbow. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” said Ben, clasping his paws in his lap. “Just…thinking.”

“About what?”

“About…home. And _that_ , knowing the difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Drunce always talked about Abe like he was this scary kidnapper who’d would take us away if he ever showed up. Not just trying to scare us, either. He was really scared of losing us, and-…you know that doesn’t mean what it would for other Glukkons.”

Dee’s arm ached from holding his entire weight, and he sank back down into the grass. Ben glanced his way at the movement and pushed the blades aside so he could see him. He wondered if Mudokons’ large eyes could see better in the dark.

“You said he raised you,” he said. “He was afraid of losing his _kids_ , not his employees.” He paused, something stirring deep in his gut. It felt so strange to say. A parent should fear losing their children. Skillya regularly _ate_ hers. He didn’t know anything about the other Slig queens or any Mudokon queens, but Mudokons were often hatched into slavery. Were their queens also slaves, or were they complicit? Aside from their earliest years, their “parents” tended to be the Sligs and Glukkons who trained and employed them, and they were notoriously selfish and cruel. But the concept of the loving, supportive parent was all over fiction. And here was a real-life example. It couldn’t _all_ be fake. Was khanzumer society just _that_ different? Or had their two species been taught _not you_ , a memo his mind had refused to pick up like it had enjoying inflicting pain, or the concept of playful insults in his earliest years?

“I wonder if…he knew,” Ben said. “He knew the way other Glukkons treated their workers. Why didn’t he see it, that Abe was the result of _that_ , and he wasn’t like them?”

“ _We_ didn’t see it, either,” said Dee. “The news kept going on and on about the damage he’d caused and how the missing workers hurt the economy, and the Slig and Gluk deaths. Easy to miss it if your attention’s being pulled somewhere else.”

“I’d like to think he’d understand, if someone pointed it out. But he’d be heartbroken if any of us wanted to leave… I just can’t imagine him letting us go with Abe if he _had_ shown up.”

“He probably wouldn’t,” Dee said. “Not to spoil your view of him and all, but - the way he was dressed, what’s his income bracket? Big Cheese?”

Ben released the blades of grass he’d held aside, forcing Dee to fight his way back into his pants to sit up. “Yeah,” he said sullenly. “Yeah, he was a Big Cheese, just barely.”

“Bet part of it was the employee retention. You had, what, zero turnover, I bet?”

“One,” said Ben, not looking directly at him. “We lost one person.”

“Okay. _Practically_ zero, compared to other Gluks,” said Dee. “Was it voluntary?”

Ben shook his head. “Accident,” he said, and he sounded so close to tears Dee had a hard time continuing. He reached out to put his hand on his arm.

“Good enough as an answer. He loved you, can’t say he didn’t. Let you hide behind him, for Odd’s sake. But…I don’t think he’d have let you go.”

Ben sniffled, wiping his eyes with his forearm.

“You can cry if you gotta,” said Dee. “Hurts too much to hide how you feel. Trust me on that.”

Ben shook his head. “I-…I just… I don’t know _how_ to feel.” He raised his face to the sky, looking out into the blackness and satellites and distant stars in silent contemplation. After a moment, he lifted his paw to the indentation on the moon, breath shivering in his effort not to cry.

Dee fell silent, and let Ben feel whatever it was he was feeling. How could he chime in, on something so rare, almost _sacred_ in the way it stirred his heart, as feeling safe in seeking guidance? As having someone in one’s life loved well enough to mourn, however flawed?

\---

Sunlight on the open field, not filtered through leaves or broken up by the shadows of trees, seemed to transform the world. Dee had grown up around the color green – Sligs were green once they matured, most Mudokons were some shade of green, several Glukkons favored the color in their logos because it stood out against the stark gray of their architecture. And somehow, the grass that stretched ahead of them was more vibrant than anything. The clear skies above gave a much greater sense of openness than they had at twilight. It felt like, though the mountains they were headed for were not far, it could be truly endless.

Perhaps it was this vast, open space that encouraged Ben to speak up again, about the life he’d left behind.

“He knew. Not about Abe, maybe. But…the way life was for other Mudokons.”

“Yeah?” Dee looked up at him. “It’d be hard _not_ to know you stick out.”

“Um…” Ben’s gaze drifted forward, not quite fixed on the mountains ahead. “Is it all right if I talk about it?”

Dee tilted his head. If he hadn’t had mechanical legs he might have stumbled from the distraction. “Yeah? What’s with the hesitation?”

“I dunno. You’re under a lot of stress, yourself, and your life hasn’t been that great.”

“Doesn’t mean you don’t have your own problems?” He’d thought that was obvious. Had he said or done something to make it seem otherwise? Or was that on Ben? He thought of the way he rarely cried where he could see. Maybe he hadn’t been allowed to be himself in full, after all, in his comfortable life.

“I guess… I just wanted to- make sure you were okay with it. We were at the train station, heading for a meeting. One of the attendants helped a Glukkon unload his luggage for a transfer, and halfway to the other train, he dropped one. A Slig on patrol picked it up and put it back on top of the stack for him.”

Dee flinched hard enough to stop steering, coming to a halt. “Oh, _no_.”

Ben grimaced. “I didn’t know that was a- _thing_ , that you couldn’t even be the tiniest bit nice to us.”

“Depends on the guy in charge, some bosses crack down harder for it than others. Guessing Drunce’s place on that scale was ‘not at all’.”

Ben nodded, sniffling back more tears. “Yeah. I had no idea, until that day.”

“The guy’s boss was watching?”

“One of the managers below him, but close enough. He called for some other Mudokon to take over, ushered the other Glukkon on to his train. Ours was delayed so we were stuck, just us waiting for that train and the station staff. He led both the Mudokon and the Slig off into that elevated office booth.”

Dee swallowed heavily, suddenly acutely aware of the pain in his injured arm, the heaviness of his travel-weary body. “He didn’t wait for the platform to clear out.”

“We were all…people that ‘should’ understand, was the thing. Nobody from so far away they wouldn’t… I don’t know, have a different ‘normal’? The window was that fancy mirrored stuff so we couldn’t see inside, too. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess? The first gunshot made me jump. There was a pause-…” Ben blinked back tears and failed, a shiver interrupting him, as if it was carrying that first dam-breaking sob out of his throat.

Dee waited as Ben cried his way through the bad memories. As protective as Drunce was of him, he doubted that if he was at all sober he would have openly comforted his upset slave as if he was the child to him he truly was. If he had any care at all for his public appearance, he would have even demanded he stop crying.

Ben finally took a breath deep enough to continue without crying too hard to speak. “There was another shot. And then the manager walked out alone, called a couple of janitors to clean up in there. They’d even stopped working and waited for it, they knew already. The other people – Sligs started laughing, some Glukkons followed. I was- I was clinging to Mr. Drunce’s arm so hard my paws were actually wrapped around his entire arm, even through his suit. It had to have been putting so much strain on his elbow on the other side. But he let me. It was better to let me cling than let me cry and do nothing about _that_. That’s what he said later.”

Dee nodded, his breath stolen by the story. Termination stories were hard to swallow in the best of circumstances, especially when a Slig was involved – in order for Skillya to even _think_ about waiving the charge for damages, it had to be provable that they would have been killed by the queen, herself. “You-…you gotta kinda hope he had a security guy in his office,” he said, and he hadn’t even considered his mind and Ben’s hadn’t been in sync because Ben gasped through a startled hiccup.

“Oh, _Odd_ , I hadn’t even considered he _hadn’t_ had another Slig in there!”

“Can’t be fined for destroying Ma’s property if the property destroyed itself. Then it’s just defective.”

“Her prop-…but you guys are _paid_!”

“And we keep our Moolah at her discretion. Besides, not legally owning yourself doesn’t mean you’re unpaid. Some of you guys even get pay, too.” Dee wondered if he sounded cold. He was afraid of being caught, but he didn’t have to. There wasn’t another Slig or a Glukkon for miles. But it had always been so instinctive, he couldn’t tell now, if he’d gone “flat” in self-defense. He only ever consciously realized it after the fact.

“Wait, really?”

“You hadn’t been paid? I’m surprised Drunce didn’t-…” He suddenly remembered that Drunce was different from even the ‘kinder’ Glukkons he was basing his assumption on. “Oh, shit. Giving you money would encourage you to go out there. He doesn’t sound like the type who’d want to risk that.”

“Oh…oh, yeah. To protect us.” Ben rubbed his arm nervously; Dee nearly unconsciously mimed it and was grateful he was carrying his gun to prevent it. “Some of the second wave – we raised them; Mr. Drunce got the nursery finished after us - thought maybe he was just saying that to keep us from making a break for it. We only had one guard on night watch, after all. I got to tell everyone that story when we got home, and-…well, that was the end of _that_ theory.”

Dee swallowed, trying to coax saliva into his dry throat. “Did-…” He wondered if he should say _your dad_ for Drunce, to try to insist he wasn’t heartless, in case he’d come off as such in his own distress. But not even Ben called him that. Dee put down his gun, forcing his fingers to unclench, and reached up to put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Did Drunce talk to you at all about it, at least?”

Ben nodded, reaching up to clasp his hand under his trembling paw. “Yeah. Broke down crying that night – couldn’t keep quiet enough to avoid waking him up, even from in the bathroom. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, either. He sat with me, held my paw, and just let me cry.”

“Shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but he actually got down on his bathroom floor to comfort you?”

Ben sniffed, managed a little smile. “Yeah…he’s the best kind of weird, it turns out. _Was_ the best kind of weird…” A sigh, and another sniff. “I asked him what we could have done, why the other Glukkons were like that. He just…” He reached up with his free paw to wipe his tears away as physical narration, “…caught my tears on his knuckles, said that was their prerogative and there was nothing he could do. But he would always do his best to keep me and the rest of us safe.”

“He’s got a _lot_ of arm mobility in this story…” Dee pointed out, hoping to distract Ben from his grief somewhat.

It worked; Ben chuckled. “Pillow-hugger. He had me cut slits into his nightgown so he didn’t get tangled up or strain something in his sleep. Who was gonna see who’d care?”

“He cultivated a staff who loved him,” said Dee. “You wouldn’t try to embarrass him out of spite. That’s… Dunno if he _meant_ to do that, but that’s actually pretty smart.”

“People called him ‘Dunce’, but…he _really_ wasn’t. The only people who hated working for him were Sheth and Oli, the two newer guards. They weren’t expecting what they got. But…I bet, deep down, they’re missing the freedom to just sleep in the sun.”

“You weren’t ‘problem Muds’ at all.”

“Of course not. I mean, yeah, some of the second wave still had their doubts even after I cried my eyes out at them all, but we were comfortable…” He trailed off and looked back, as if he could see the wreckage of Aydik’s home – or maybe the vineyards – from this far away. A strong breeze stirred his feathers and seemed to snap him from a reverie, and he gave Dee’s hand a pat before turning to keep walking, shrugging it off. 

Dee ran to catch up, and they walked in silence for a while longer, as if all the weight of Ben’s story had settled on their tongues.

Eventually, Ben spoke again. “Hey, Dee? I just thought-…someone else had to have bought up Paradise Vineyards. If we do somehow get the tribal folks to point us to Abe, do you think we can convince him to help free the others? They must be so miserable now…”

“Probably, yeah. If we’re right about that being what he’s actually been about all this time.”

One more reason to ensure he got there safely, he thought. And then stay alive to keep protecting him, because he’d said he wanted Abe to _help_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed I have a definite chapter count now! Drafting is complete, no matter how much it felt like I would never finish! Take that, executive dysfunction! 
> 
> Now to actually, you know, make it all work as a story. But it all exists in some form from start to finish and hopefully - _hopefully_! - that means faster updates. Thank you all for reading so far and I hope you've been enjoying the story to this point, it's certainly been a lot of fun writing it.


End file.
